Collective Faith-Based Child Cruelty

Considering that this book exclusively delves into the topic of child witchcraft accusations, it is appropriate to dedicate a chapter to the in-depth exploration of this matter and its interconnected facets. Recognizing the diverse familial backgrounds and socioeconomic contexts from which children facing accusations of witchcraft originate, certain beliefs serve as essential symbols and guardians of societal norms and ethical principles. Similarly, elucidating the process of establishing accusations can aid readers in discerning instances of child accusations. As highlighted in the introductory chapter, many children accused of witchcraft may not be used to being labeled as witches. Instead, they might be informed of their purported possession by evil spirits, perceived as peculiar, or deemed to require spiritual intervention for perceived abnormalities.

Moreover, as will be explained later in chapter 3, within everyday Yoruba community settings, it is not uncommon for many angry parents, primarily mothers, to call their children derogatory names, including elemi buburu (meaning “carrier of bad spirit”). While such words might be considered a one-off uttered during the parent's fit against the child, there are cases where repetitive utterances on the same child deemed unchangeable by repetitive misbehavior or wrongdoings might eventually confirm that the child is indeed possessed.

Phillipa was one of five clients I attended to as part of my job at Cherish Care. I had gotten Nurse-aid certified in December of the previous year, gotten my visa immediately after and left for England before the government could implement the electronic passport they had newly devised to control the excessive emigration. A wife of a brother of a former workmate had connected me with Cherish Care Agency, one of hundreds of African-owned hospice and care companies in the UK.

The day I left Zimbabwe, I arrived at the airport 6 hours before my departure and waited happily for my flight, the promise of a fresh start effervescing in my throat. I was finally leaving my wretched country where years of toiling for an engineering degree had amounted to a grocery store job that I had secured through connections and not merit. Everyday, I would tick the hours away doing miscellaneous stuff at an OK Supermarket located on the corner of Robert Mugabe and Inez Terrence Street. My duties at that job were non-specific, and my skills were an adaptable disposition and a need to survive. I would mop the floors in the staff toilets every two hours. I had to stack countless commodities I could never afford whenever I was not at the toilets. I would occasionally offer disinterested guidance to lost customers in the aisles at random. Faceless shoppers who could only be distinguished by the contents of their baskets. Government employees usually had medium sized baskets holding only basics. A few rich Hararians strolled past me with overfilled trollies, large assortments of meats and beers exposing their plans to braai the weekend away.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing(1729–1781) was the early leading figure in the humanist revival in German culture that culminated in Weimar Classicism. His plays and drama criticism mark the rise of middle-class forms and values over the course of the eighteenth century and influ¬enced contemporaries and successors alike. His work in art theory con¬tinues to stimulate discussion, while his liberal theological writing has had a perhaps even greater impact. Lessing first drew major attention in the United States during the period of heightened interest in German litera¬ture that began in the early nineteenth century. He achieved his greatest notoriety through the publication of English translations of a key biog¬raphy in 1866, his best-known play two years later, and his perhaps most important essay in 1874. Formal study of Lessing and his work accompa¬nied the emergence of Germanistik (German Studies) as a scholarly disci¬pline, first in Germany in the early nineteenth century, and eventually all over the West and beyond.

Interest in Lessing has been particularly keen in the United States, not least of all due to successive waves of immigrant scholars from Germany, peaking after each of the two world wars. This interest is reflected in the founding of the American Lessing Society in 1966 and the publication of the Lessing Yearbook, beginning in 1969, as well as numerous conference volumes. Since its establishment, the Lessing Society has entered into col-laborative arrangements with the Lessing-Akademie in Wolfenbüttel, the Lessing-Museum and the Arbeitsstelle für Lessing-Rezeption (Research Center for Lessing Reception) in Kamenz, and the Lessing-Gesellschaft (Lessing Society) in Hamburg. Such internationalization of the Society's work led in 1972 to the elimination of the word “American” from its title and in 1979 to the addition of “Jahrbuch” to the title of its annual publication. Through the activities of the Lessing Society its namesake has long enjoyed a high degree of recognition and respect in the United States. However, this appreciation is limited virtually exclusively to the sphere of academia, largely to German departments at American colleges and universities.

In June 1854, Anna Bauer, age nineteen, traveled with her parents to the spa town of Carlsbad, where the family had already spent many summers. This year was different, however, as the time away came on the heels of a major family tragedy: the death of Anna's younger sister Clara at age sixteen only five months earlier. Clara had often been sickly, and died of pleurisy—inflammation of the lungs—after a short illness. In Carlsbad, Anna wrote in her diary about the ways that experiencing the beauty, intricate delicacy, and wonders of nature could help her find solace in the face of pain. Nature and her faith also allowed her to come to terms with her family's personal tragedy:

Asuccession of revisionist and post-revisionist historians – notably Christopher Haigh, Jack Scarisbrick, Eamon Dufy, Alexandra Walsham, Peter Marshall – have demonstrated the strength and resilience far into Elizabeth's reign of continuing popular adherence to Catholic belief and practice, the hold of the ‘old religion’. The ‘English Reformation’, initiated under Henry VIII and Edward VI, was not a rapid triumph already secure by the accession of Elizabeth I, but rather a long and difcult struggle whose crucial phase began rather than ended in 1558.2 As Alec Ryrie puts it, changing law and liturgy was one thing, changing lives another: ‘we are forced to contemplate the possibility that the English Reformation really began in the year it was conventionally said to have ended: 1558, or more plausibly 1559’. The protestantisation of the English church proved a longue durée incomplete even at Elizabeth's death in 1603. For much of her long reign the Church of England functioned as a legally prescribed national Church with a partially Protestant liturgy and theology and a largely pre-Protestant or anti-Protestant laity.Tat great historian of Elizabethan Protestantism, Patrick Collinson, reached the conclusion that even in apparently ‘advanced’ counties, like Kent, ‘Protestants were a minority sect until well into Elizabeth's reign’. The Elizabethan reformation, as Peter Marshall puts it, was ‘a crucible of religious identity formation’, the period and process ‘through which something akin to modern religious and denominational identities came into existence’.

There were three main reasons why the campaign to have Guðmundr Arason canonized by the Roman Catholic Church failed during the fourteenth century. The first was its timing, which was inauspicious because the papacy had recently tightened its rules for establishing canonized sainthood and was less likely than previously to accept local, popularly based cults such as that of Guðmundr. The second was the character of the candidate himself, who, while popular locally and frequently referred to by the epithet inn góði [the good], had in fact a very chequered history as an effective pillar of the Church, a discrepancy that needed to be carefully sanitized by his promoters. The third reason, and in some respects the most important, lay in the media of communication apparently chosen for his local promotion, namely prose and poetry in the Icelandic language. It is most unlikely that a readership from outside Western Scandinavia would have been able to understand these Icelandic literary works and appreciate their formal and stylistic rules, even though they followed the standard conventions of hagiography in their vernacular format. Further, these sagas and poems would have been unlikely to have provided the kind of documentary evidence of Guðmundr's sanctity that the papal authorities required in order to establish a new cult. Even assuming that a Latin Vita had been written, further documentary evidence in Latin, such as witness statements and separate accounts of miracles, would probably have been required.

7.1 Introduction

By the 830s at the latest, Vikings established bases to raid Irish churches with strategic and political purpose. In 837 Irish annals identify a Viking leader active in the central east as Saxolb, a toísech ‘chieftain’ (= jarl?). Other leaders in the mid-840s lack titles, but can be linked to bases or zones of activity: Turgés in 845 (the Shannon), and Ágonn in 847 (Dublin) (see Fig. 7.1 for locations in Ireland). Familiarity on the part of the annalist and his circle is implied. In 848, Tomrair erell ‘jarl’ and tánaise ‘deputy/heir apparent’ of the king of Laithlinn, seemingly a unique combination of titles (of which more below), is the first Viking ‘royal’ noticed in Irish annals. Understanding Viking royal intervention in mid-ninth-century Ireland hangs on the location of Laithlinn, and on Irish annalists’ differentiation between ‘Fair’ and ‘Black’ Vikings. If the latter dichotomy denotes ‘royal’-led Vikings from what was to become Norway, and Danes, respectively, as I argue, the implications for Viking-Age history extend beyond Ireland. Relations between Vikings in Ireland and Britain in the 860s and 870s, the era of the ‘Great Army’, are considered in Chapter 8. Here, I argue that events in Ireland, England and Francia in the early 850s had a hitherto unnoticed causal link to contemporary Danish politics, and shed light on the ninth-century history of what was to become Norway.

INTRODUCTION

This tract includes one of the most lurid accounts of the witches’ sabbat in the whole of Scottish witchcraft writing. It is also among the most theoretical – and detached from practicalities of Scottish witchcraft experience as this appeared in witchcraft prosecutions. The anonymous author claims that his account is based on ‘the most Authentick Authors, Divine and humane, Ancient and Modern’. He has clearly read widely, but his citations are almost entirely to the Bible. The only non-biblical authors explicitly mentioned are Moses Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra, both medieval Jewish philosophers. The author's interest in the Hebrew and Chaldean languages is notable. He may well have been a minister, since the opening pages and the two concluding paragraphs are full of the kind of practical Calvinist divinity that ministers were accustomed to employ in their sermons. The material on ancient languages may have come from a biblical commentary rather than from specialist study.

The tract is up to date in focusing on demonic possession – a topic that appears as soon as witchcraft proper becomes the sustained focus (pp. 10–11). The discussion at that point may well allude to the Bargarran case of 1697. News of this case may have prompted the author to write or at least to publish his tract; perhaps he was even one of the numerous ministers who were drawn into the case. We do not know when in 1697 the tract was printed, but its Glasgow printer may indicate an author in the west. There is a mention of a possessed person pulling cloth from the garments of their ‘tormentor’ (p. 11), something that had been reported at Bargarran. The tract's repeated use of the otherwise rare word ‘wizards’ calls to mind the first of the published Bargarran tracts. There is nevertheless no explicit mention of the Bargarran case.