Switzerland’s Last ‘Witch’ Exonerated

A Swiss woman executed for witchcraft in 1782 is the subject of a new museum. A new book examines her case and calls for judicial exoneration. From Newsweek’s article:

In the hamlet of Mollis, population 3,000, a road the width of a single car was renamed Anna Göldi Way for the 225th anniversary of her death on June 13. In a mansion along the road, on a grassy gated lot, a new permanent exhibition at the local museum details Göldi’s ordeal. Just as American schoolchildren read Arthur Miller’s McCarthy-era parable “The Crucible,” about 17th-century superstition and persecution in Salem, Mass., Swiss children learn of Göldi. Europe too was the stage for accusations of sorcery and the burning of outcasts deemed witches by maniacal courts. The death toll is estimated to have been 50,000 in Europe.

Today, historians trying to explain the flights of anxiety that sparked witch hunts blame everything from high inflation to cyclical poor weather and low crop yields to the tensions of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation of the day. But the difference, the shame, of the Glarus story is that when Göldi was beheaded with a sword in 1782, 90 years after Salem, Europe should have known better. “Witch” killings on the continent had dropped off precipitously after 1650. Other Swiss cantons, Geneva in 1652 and Zurich in 1701, had long since executed their last alleged witches. Europe was awash with the Enlightenment, and superstition was meant to have ceded to reason. It was, after all, only about 100 years before Le Corbusier and Paul Klee, Louis Chevrolet and Carl Jung, modern Swiss who are today part of our globalized lexicon.

In a semi-related vein, Jason Pitzl-Waters covers an attempted suit against someone’s dead witch Halloween display. No, I don’t think it’s a “hate crime” either (but Senator Clinton’s supporters might, since the “witch” is apparently her).

But read the comments and see what you think.

Slow-Cooked Campfire Gallimaufry

¶ If you are not totally saturated with LOLcat humor, there is always the LOLCat Bible. (Via Boing Boing.)

¶ Download a quick Dutch oven cookbook. Then at your next festival, elbow aside all those half-naked dancers, set your cast-iron Dutch oven in the lambent coals, and enjoy a drink while waiting for baked goodness.

¶ Ready for some retro-Web design? Download traditional tunes from the British Isles, Ireland, and “the colonies” in low-res MIDI format. Then visitors to your Web site can listen to them over and over until they hit the BACK button repeatedly to get away from the noise. (Lyrics also available.) Or maybe you just want to remember how “John Peel” goes.

¶ If you are an alchemist or on the staff at Hogwarts, your name is here. (Hat tip to Stone Circles.)

A Splash of Fall Color

Photo by Chas S. Clifton, Oct. 7, 2007Virginia creeper in autumn color, growing in the willows along Hardscrabble Creek.

The Dream and the Job

In the dream last night I was at some kind of Protestant Christian youth camp, headed by the stereotypical big, extroverted, 30-something youth minister.

A teenaged girl was supposed to be baptized, but the minister had to leave suddenly, so he asked me to baptize her. His request presented two problems:

1. I did not know how this denomination performed the ceremony. 2. Would a baptism by Pagan me be valid anyway?

I shoved issue #2 aside while searching for the book—a sort of combination prayer book and textbook—that would tell me how to perform it. I remember looking up “baptism” in the index: there were multiple page references.

As dreams do, this one trailed off with no clear resolution. The girl was not feeling well and wanted to postpone the baptism—or something.

The deam revealed its meaning, I think, in one detail: my English department colleague J. was in the dream. He was one of the camp counselors. He did not play a part in the dream-plot, but I saw him waiting in line at the camp dining hall.

The dream is not about religion but about my teaching career, which will end (at least for now) when my resignation takes effect at the end of spring semester.

J. is one of the younger professors. He and I have talked about his taking over some of my minor administrative chores and also my office, which is nicer than his (windows!) and more convenient to the classrooms that we both use. In that sense, perhaps, he is “waiting in line.”

J. is a strong classroom teacher. A former Marine, he sometimes impersonates his drill instructors in the first-year composition classroom, but in a light-hearted way that the students appreciate. (I don’t know that he does it in his critical-theory classes, but maybe I should eavesdrop more.)

As for me, I need to look up whether “burnout” is one word or two. The zest is gone, although I am still looking forward to the spring nature-writing class. Right now, I have a folder full of essays from my creative-nonfiction class to critique. Those students all have some writing talent and their pieces are interesting to read , but I have to flog myself into actually writing the comments on them that they expect. On some level, I am not a “believer” anymore.

Ironically, I am probably looser and more at ease in class now than I ever was, knowing that I have the freedom of the short-timer. Maybe I learned something about how to teach writing in the last fifteen years. But now my time for research and writing is worth more to me than it was fifteen years ago.

The Silly (Halloween) Season Has Started

Just one of these for flavor: Cindy Kaie, self-righteous principal of Kohl Elementary School in Broomfield, Colorado, has decreed “no Halloween party.”

In a newsletter sent home to parents, Principal Cindy Kaier wrote that the traditional Halloween party celebrated in classrooms each year will be replaced by a fall party on Friday.

And because the party is focused on fall, not Halloween, children can’t wear costumes.

Parents expressed frustration that they weren’t included in the decision.

Consult the parents? Whatever for? Are they qualified? Do they have advanced degrees in education?

A Denver-area blogger listened to her on a radio talk show and wrote about “control mania.”

I heard part of an interview with this Kohl Elementary School principal on a local radio program this morning. Listening to Principal Cindy Kaier would make any normal person retch — politically correct drivel, educrat-ese jargon, and a smug “we know best” attitude oozed out of this woman’s mouth — this is precisely why public confidence in public education is deteriorating. How teachers who genuinely want to teach and instill the joy of learning in children can stand to work for a self-approving functionary like this is beyond my understanding.

(And that’s coming from a Green Party member, not a Rush Limbaugh clone!)

The article was not exactly clear about the cause of the ban. Does “not leaving anyone out” mean “not offending rabid Christians”? Or what?

The Wind that Shakes the Pine Trees

It’s a sunny day with a brisk wind blowing. Pine needles are in the air. M. and I both slept in a little last night after returning at midnight from one of the Spanish Peaks International Celtic Music Festival concerts.

We went to one last year too, to hear Kim Robertson’s harp and to watch Jerry O’Sullivan fight the uilleann pipes and win.

It’s truly a little odd to hear stars of the Celtic music scene play in the old coal-mining town of Walsenburg, which is definitely in the non-fashionable part of Colorado, for all that they are trying to promote it now as “gateway to the Southwest.”

Last night the harpist was Lynn Saoirse, while Seamus Connolly played fiddle and emceed. Add cellist Abby Newton, her fiddler daughter Rosie, Connolly’s Maine neighbor Kevin McElroy, John Mullen, and the duo of Kim McKee and Ken Willson, who have moved to the area and whom my Celtic music-loving colleague wants to bring to campus.

Now: house-cleaning, cabin-cleaning, desk-cleaning, and somewhere I there I have to read essays from my creative-nonfiction class.

Gallimaufry in italiano

¶ I have nothing against the Good People, but I don’t think they belong in law courts.

¶ Wicca: it really is a fashion statement.

¶ Francesca Howell, author of Magic with Gaia, speaks at an Italian Paganism conference (YouTube). Crappy video, probably from a cell phone, but interesting English and Italian soundtrack. How do you say “public outreach” in Italian, anyway? She was formerly at Naropa University but currently is living in Milan.

Gallimaufry (with horns)

Oberon Zell seems to drive some Pagans around the bend for his fondness for costuming, but who else reinvented unicorns? The original work was done by a Maine wildlife biogist whom Zell acknowledges, W. Franklin Dove, in various articles and a book, Artificial Production of the Fabulous Unicorn:a Modern Interpretation of an Ancient Myth (1936).

¶ I always say that making movies about writers is difficult because the work of writing is not very visual. Margaret Soltan links to an article about movies that are more about writers’ egos and screw-ups. I think that I will rent a couple of them.

I would add Almost Famous to the list, mainly for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s rants as a real-life character, rock journalist Lester Bangs, which are dead on.

¶ Recently a shut-down Toys ‘R Us store in Pueblo that I pass on my way to the university blossomed with new, temporary signage as a Spirit World Halloween Store. I had no idea that there was a Halloween chain store! Or that there was a category for warrior and god costumes. Or that it included “outlaw zombie”–shades of Texarcana.

Feral Apples

Picking feral apples.The equinox is for apples. First M. and walk the small ravine that cuts through our land–that is where the feral apple trees grow.

I think of them as growing from apple cores tossed from someone’s pickup window 50 years ago, but really I have no idea.

As Sally the witch says of the magicians’ orchard in Robert Graves’ Watch the North Wind Rise, these trees have been left in peace.

Only one of the feral trees has borne really well, and I will need a longer pole than my garden cultivator to knock down the high apples. “Wait until after the first frost,” M. suggests.

And then we cross the road to a neighbor’s house where two planted trees are sagging dangerously with apples. Why haven’t the bears arrived? Maybe they will tonight. We fill our bucket in just a few minutes. Apples apples applesapplesapples.

The Right Architecture for Reading

M. and I played hooky and went to Taos last weekend. I spent part of two mornings reading In Search of Zarathrustra (interview with author Paul Kriwaczek here).

The book is both an exploration of how Zorastrian ideas influenced Western monotheisms and an travel book about Iran, Afghanistan, and other regions of Central Asia.

It seemed right to read it on the patio of El Pueblo Lodge, surrounded by adobe walls, because as Kriwaczek reminds his readers, the word paradise comes from the Persian for walled garden, and many of those walls must have been mud brick.

The old parts of Taos follow the Middle Eastern/Mediterranean model: walled off from the street and easily fortified. I am acutely aware of the difference when I come home to my own house, built in the Celto-Germanic model: rectangular and decorated with antlers.