The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.

Evil is a point of view.

Take for instance the Celts in Denmark:  Traitors and deserters were hang on trees, cowards and shirkers were drown in swamps…but other bodies were found in the swamps with a special meal in their stomachs, intricate knots in their garrotes and their nakedness none of which was seen in executed victims.  And they were harder on woman–one 50-year-od woman was pined down with wooden crooks driven into her joints–and the appearance of the body seem to confirm that she was alive when the ceremony was carried out.  (a similar victim–this one 12 – 15 years old was found in Germany).  It is speculated that they were used because of something that set them apart, their family, or perhaps a physical deformity or disfigurement that made them expendable or outcast.  One 6th century cave has the bodies of mutilated women and horses.  We look back and excuse the participants due to the beliefs and barbarianism of the times and usually while we find the practice evil (some even just chock it up to paganism regrettable but expected) we forgive the participants.

And the Jewish tribes were a stiff necked lot, not suffering any pagan to practice their religion. Take Jezebel for instance.  She was a queen (probably more like  clan (tribe) chief’s  wife) married to Ahab and killed by true believers.  I went to church school and remember being told about  towns that were either destroyed by God (Sodom and Gomorrah) or conquered by the Hebrews and none left to live.  No one seemed appalled, this was the result of idolatry—it gave me chills then and still today we just read it as something expected of the time (I don’t killing entire villages men women and children bothers me a lot) with the participants as part of the world order back then.  Do this today and you’re not going to escape censor and armed intervention from the rest of the world.

 

 The Romans were the last Great Ancient Empire–They are decried now for killing–the Christians in arenas—but we don’t pay as much attention to the fact that they also destroyed Celtic Druids on an island off the coast of Wales.  In fact the Romans were while barbaric with their entertainments (evil) in the arena and the dinning hall orgies (if not evil at least decadent and probably a lot less than some Rock Stars) had a history of live and let live with new gods and goddesses.  They in fact pretty much converted the previous world power’s (Greeks) immortals into their own, only the names have been changed to create the godhead.  When they started conquering they converted the local gods and goddesses into their own.  For instance Brigit was worshiped under multiple name through out the Celtic world—when the Romans conquered she became the same as their goddess Minerva–interestingly when the world became Christian and the Church Roman Catholic Brigit became a saint.   The Roman’s persecution of religion was in most instances due to political issues as in the instance of the resistive Druids the real motivating power among the Celts.  While in the case of the Christian the persecution seems to be more on a local level and involved their keeping apart from the pagans and misconception of their rites and beliefs—something seen in medieval times in a Christian Jewish context.  Also when Christianity did come in the Romans began prosecuting  pagans instead.  We conceive the Romans to be more Evil but is that because we have more of their history or because the persecution is now more personal to the basic identity of Christianity?

With the coming of Christianity came the ousting of Jews from entire countries while Knights  of European Origin went to their homeland to free it from the Muslims who held it now.  The knights who actually destroyed Jewish communities on the way, were given awards by the church, but alas they were eventually defeated and time moved on.  Both sides to this day point out evil acts–but we tend to be less forgiving to these participants than we had previously been.

Then came the split–the Church became Catholic and Protestant and then Protestant split into various churches which continue to this day to spawn sects and reformed memberships.  The Church executed many (and many Christians on both side cry evil over these acts).  But the Catholics were not alone according to Gerald Warner in today’s Telegraph: Just dealing with the Tudors Catholic  Mary I (nick named Bloody) had 284 Protestant heretics burned.  While the Protestant Children in the family:  Edward VI’s troops killed more than 5,500 Cornish Catholics (after the Prayer Book Rebellion) and Elizabeth I while avoiding a lot of major executions (exception St Margaret Clitheroe was pressed to death at York and Mary Queen of Scots beheaded–though in defense of the Mary Thing it wasn’t because she was Catholic but because she was a focus of the Catholics to regain the throne from Elizabeth) “but the butchery in Ireland (under Elizabeth) was appalling. There, Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, supported a policy of extermination by artificial famine on a scale that was not exceeded until Stalin in the 1930s.”

And so as you can see by this brief and simplistic account of our religious past that our beliefs and methods have evolved through to a move civilized place..but I think that looking at it is important to understand our changing attitudes toward good and evil and how not so long ago the normal and the good was so much different.

RESOURCES:

The New Book of Goddesses & Heroines:  Patricia Monaghan

The World of the Druids:  Miranda J. Green