posted December 02, 2007 08:53 AM         

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Lilith’s myth is widely recognized as Adam’s first wife, when they were created equally as described in Genesis 1:26

" And God said: ’Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’."

Although, I find it interesting to note that both Adam and Eve didn’t make their official appearance until Genesis chapter two; so the passage may actually refer to Lilith and Samael as they are described as an androgynous pair. This is also outlined in Treatise on the Left Emanation. (see above Contents)

Lilith’s first official appearance as Adam’s vengeful ex-wife was in the Alphabet of Ben Sira (see Contents above), a likely parody of Jewish folk tales and beliefs. Lilith was created as an equal with Adam, and when Adam demanded to be on top during sex; Lilith uttered the Ineffable Name of God and flew away to the Red Sea. Adam complained to God, who sent three angels to bring her back to Eden. Lilith refused, citing that God had created her to cause sickness to infants; and made a pact with the angels that she would not harm any infant who had the names of the angels written over the crib. However, this pact still cost Lilith a hundred of her own demonic children a day. This story is the reason why Lilith earned the figurative title "World’s First Feminist" as she is the woman who sacrifices paradise, and many of her own children; than be forced to exist in a state of servitude.

While some assert that the Lilith myth was created in the Alphabet of Ben Sira (see Contents above); but I think it’s more possible that the Alphabet may have parodied the story of Istahar, a flood story about a woman who uttered the Ineffable Name of God to escape sexual domination from angels. Regardless of questionable origin, Lilith was real enough to appear in amulets and in the Zohar - a compendium of Jewish mysticism and knowledge of the spirit realms.

The Zohar contributes the most to Lilith’s mythology. The Zohar describes her as being the Serpent, being the wife of Sammael, being the wife of God himself also, and even originating from influences of angels. Lilith even appears in astrology, and associated with certain phases of the Moon, and the fixed star Algol

posted December 02, 2007 08:54 AM         

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Lilith’s link to the garden of Eden is symbolized in Christian iconography that may have been inspired by the Zohar. Also, Lilith as Serpent is not limited by her functions in Eden, but also as other important figures such as Blind Dragon and Leviathan.

There are many passages that define Lilith as Serpent. The most obvious passage, says Lilith as the Serpent had an affair with Eve before she had intercourse with Adam. This is the most expressive passage relating to Lilith that contains a description of being both a Serpent and using temptation.

Llith and Sammael are also described as serpents of two qualities; the Slant Serpent and the Torturous Serpent.

Quoting Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim 186d

"And about this mystery it is written, And on that day the Lord with His sore and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the Slant Serpent, and Leviathan the Tortuous Serpent, and He will slay the Dragon that is in the sea (Isa. 27:1). Leviathan is the connection and the coupling between the two who have the likeness of serpents. Therefore it is doubled: the Slant Serpent corresponding to Samael, and the Tortuous Serpent corresponding to Lilith...."

Although this page only outlines Lilith’s Serpentine attributes, the reader is faced with the challenge of interpreting it about how it affects Lilith’s image and lesson to devotees. I personally interpret Lilith as governing the aspect of consciousness of the Sammael/Lilith androgyny. The intermediary, Blind Dragon, may be seen as symbolic of the Kundalini serpent energy that is connected to our unseen abilities and everyday consciousness. Lilith is Blind Dragon, and is both Serpent energy and consciousness to control that energy in the use of witchcraft and magick.

Sammael may be seen as the physical serpent, Lilith’s connection to the air can also be seen as breath used to form words to speak to Eve to convey the importance of partaking in Knowledge and understanding what existence is like when living without dignity with Adam. Most of all, Lilith is the guardian of the Tree of Knowledge, her Serpent self symbolic of the Tree of Knowledge energy, the Tree’s own Kundalini that flows up through it’s branches like a wellspring of undefiled wisdom.

posted December 02, 2007 08:54 AM         

lets move to Tantra and Yoga :biggrin:

from what i have learnt in Tantra there are 3 major energy channels in our body, all metaphorically likened to serpents, ida and pingala
Sushumna Nadi passes through the hollow cylindrical cavity of the vertebral column and Ida is on the left side and Pingala on the right side of the spine.
Nadis are the astral channels through which Prana (vital energy) flows to different parts of the body. Ida, Pingala and Sushumna are the most important of the innumerable Nadis

Kundalini, the serpent power or mystic fire, is the primordial energy or Sakti that lies dormant or sleeping in the Muladhara Chakra, the centre of the body. It is called the serpentine or annular power on account of serpentine form. It is an electric fiery occult power, the great pristine force which underlies all organic and inorganic matter.

Kundalini is the cosmic power in individual bodies. It is not a material force like electricity, magnetism, centripetal or centrifugal force. It is a spiritual potential Sakti or cosmic power. In reality it has no form. The Sthula Buddhi and mind have to follow a particular form in the beginning stage. From this gross form, one can easily, understand the subtle formless Kundalini. Prana, Ahamkara, Buddhi, Indriyas, mind, five gross elements, nerves are all the products of Kundalini.

It is the coiled-up, sleeping Divine Sakti that lies dormant in all beings. You have seen in the Muladhara Chakra that there is SIVA Linga. The head of the Linga is the space where Sushumna channel is attached to the Kanda. This mysterious Kundalini lies face downwards at the mouth of Sushumna Nadi on the head of SIVA Linga. It has three and a half coils like a serpent. When it is awakened, it makes a hissing sound like that of a serpent beaten with a stick, and proceeds to the topmost crown chakra piercing all chakras and leading to christ consciousness.

sounds familiar

there have been a lot of biblical studiers and books in recent years that instigate that the Bible is in Code, it is not to be taken literally , as well as the Kabbala and other Hebrew literaure. All of them have eerie metaphorical parallels to Hinda mythology and yogic beliefs.
Moses saw a firy bush in the desert. -- that was his kundalini. for days afterward people were not to gaze at his face.
how can they when the cosmic fire had been unleashed in him ?
the Eden story has deep tantric tones to it. how and why does a benevolent father kick out his creatons from Eden, just becoz they listened to a snake and ate the apple ??
oh get it now, Lilith the snake on the tree of knowledge is the kundalini, the awakening of which leads to nirvana, and powers equal to that of God. the knowledge that we r GOD.
THAT is why Adam and Eve got kicked out, not for eating an apple, they made love, and awakened their Kundalini the Tantric way.

also makes sense why the Roman catholic church had to kill 9 million women in the middle ages to make sure their crappy bible version of women being the gates to hell was ingrained in the heads of everyone.
Sure if people thought and KNEW, that sexual energy- kundalini that lives inside us is that which creates and sustains the cosmos, who would need to go to Church for salvation

posted December 02, 2007 08:57 AM         

the sheep that dont try to question why the Vatican had to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews, Moslems AND Christians ( who were original followers of christ, not baptised by the church ) in the name of acquring the HOLY LAND.

why the Vatican murdered 9 MILLION women in the Middle ages .
by the way i have a PDF copy of " Malleus Malicforum "
interesting reading, asking all children of the church to condemn as witches the following

healers
psychics
midwives
widows
herb gatherers
astrologers
immortal women
unmarried women --
basically back in the middle ages if u were neither married nor a prostitute and were making ur own money or were highly Spiritual not a Religious church goer , a woman EVE would be proud of --- U were considered fit to be raped, torturted by clergy ( by raping u the priests are purging u of ur evil ) and then u would be tied to a stake for the whole town or village to see so they wouldn't dare to be like u and ofcourse roasted like hot turkey.

WHY ??
becoz it is hard work to destroy the pagan belief system that was in practice in Europe that equated a woman as a Goddess, an Equal to man.when u want to sell to ur consumers u have to burn the competition like Bill Gates..

but ofcourse faithful sheep that the christians are it is easy to go to church and pray to a Lord God becoz these things happened so many centuries ago, becoz, it is not one of our friends, wives, sisters, family in danger from the Same church TODAY .or that those hundred thousands innocent butchered in the crusades had no right to live on our Holy Land. they had it coming.

that is not to be compared to what our noble christian missionaries did in India when they found original followers of Christ who were following the Real christianity long before any church even opened office in India. too disgusting to type, google on " christian conversion tactics used in India "

if i have offeneded any pious , church goer, bible thumping Christian / Catholic, i am not going to apologise for yelling the bare truth out for everyone.
it's just that with transiting Pluto going over my natal lilith and opposed to my Kalli, the Vatican Vipers had it coming

a reading of the above Biblical, Kabbalic, Hebrew info should suffice a thorough understanding of what Lilith means.
use basic psychology to apply the meaning of Lilith to the aspects it makes to your planets and others in synastry.

but why this whole exercise in codes ? why this need to grovel in the bloody filth that is Christian history ?
To reclaim what has been taken from us women our sexuality , our Divinity.
To account those innocents, 9 million of them who fell prey to that Million Dollar organisation that is the Roman Catholic Church.
yes it happened ages ago, but if we sleep on it and ignore it, adopt moral laryngitis we can pave the way for it to happen again.

posted December 02, 2007 09:11 AM         

The Holy Inquisitions

The Church

"Anyone who attempts to construe a personal view of God which conflicts with Church dogma must be burned without pity."

- Pope Innocent III

The Inquisition was an ecclesiastical court and process of the Roman Catholic Church setup for the purpose towards the discovery and punishment of heresy which wielded immense power and brutality in medieval and early modern times. The Inquisitions function was principally assembled to repress all heretics of rights, depriving them of their estate and assets which became subject to the ownership of the Catholic treasury, with each relentlessly sought to destroy anyone who spoke, or even thought differently to the Catholic Church. This system for close to over six centuries became the legal framework throughout most of Europe that orchestrated one of the most confound religious orders in the course of mankind

The Holy Witchhunts

The term witch comes from the Old English word wicca, which is derived from the Germanic root wic, meaning to bend or to turn. Such accounts of witchcraft are found extensively in antiquity from Medea who employed sorcery to help Jason win the Golden Fleece, to the Witch of Endor in the Old Testament by whom King Saul consulted.

Most justification of the persecution of witches in Europe all later based themselves on such biblical percepts as commanded through that,

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. (with Exodus.22:18 )",

or that "the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God; and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. (1 Cor. 10:20)"

These imputations from the 8th century and up then saw witchcraft becoming highly associated with apostasy with extensive and very violent campaigns taking place to mark its spread.

in The Dark Side of Christian History, Helen Ellerbe provided a baseline on the 300 year period of witch hunting from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, in what R.H. Robbins calls "the shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of western civilization," that ensured the European abandonment of the belief in magic. The Church created the elaborate concept of devil worship and then, used the persecution of it to wipe out dissent, subordinate the individual to authoritarian control, and openly denigrate women.

The witchhunts became an eruption of orthodox Christianity's vilification of women, or "the weaker vessel," in St. Peter's words. The second century St. Clement of Alexandria wrote:

"Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman."

The sixth century Christian philosopher, Boethius, wrote in The Consolation of Philosophy,

"Woman is a temple built upon a sewer."

Bishops at the sixth century Council of Macon voted as to whether women had souls. In the tenth century Odo of Cluny declared,

"To embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure..."

The thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas suggested that God had made a mistake in creating woman:

"nothing [deficient] or defective should have been produced in the first establishment of things; so woman ought not to have been produced then."

Lutherans at Wittenberg debated whether women were really human beings at all. Orthodox Christians held women responsible for all sin. As the Bible's Apocrypha states,

"Of woman came the beginning of sin/ And thanks to her, we all must die."

It is women who are often understood to be impediments to spirituality in a context where God reigns strictly from heaven and demands a renunciation of physical pleasure. As I Corinthians 7:1 states,

"It is a good thing for a man to have nothing to do with a woman.

posted December 02, 2007 09:12 AM         

In 1487, two Dominicans, Sprenger and Kramer wrote the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (the Hammer for Witches). It had 3O reprints by 1669 and was the Inquisitor's handbook of questions and torture to be asked by the best legal and judicial brains of the time at the witch's trial. Another example of how the legal mind can come to any conclusion it wants, or needs to, irrespective of reason and evidence. Careful accounting records, just like at the Nazi concentration camps, were kept for subsidiary tasks like cataloguing, imprisoning and torturing costs.
Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger assembled many fairy tales and magic stories, nightmares, hearsay, confessions and accusations and put this all together as factual information in what became the handbook for the witch hunters, examiners, torturers and executioners, called the Malleus Maleficarum, a title which was translated as Hammer of Witches. It was published in 1487, but two years previously the authors had secured a bull from Pope Innocent VIII, authorizing them to continue the witch hunt in the Alps which they had already instituted against the opposition from clergy and secular authorities. They reprinted the bull of December 5, 1484 to make it appear that the whole book enjoyed papal sanction.

Anybody with a grudge or suspicion, very young children included, could accuse anyone of witchcraft and be listened to with attention; anyone who wanted someone else’s property or wife could accuse; any loner, any old person living alone, anyone with a misformity, physical or mental problem was likely to be accused. Open hunting season was declared on women, especially herb gatherers, midwives, widows and spinsters. Women who had no man to supervise them were of course highly suspicious.

It has been estimated by Dr. Marija Gimbutas, professor of archaeology at the University of California, that as many as 9 million people, overwhelmingly women, were burned or hanged during the witch-craze. For nearly 250 years the Witches’ Hammer was the guidebook for the witch hunters, but again some of the inquisitioners had misgivings about this devilish book. In a letter dated November 27, 1538 Salazar advised the inquisitioners not to believe everything they read in Malleus Maleficarum, even if the authors write about it as something they themselves have seen and investigated (Henningson p.347)

.

Midwives who carried the knowledge of the ancient contraceptive methods were special targets of the Inquisition.

Anonymous dobbing-in was much encouraged and children denouncing their parents justified (Matt 21:16).

Since the Malleus manual questions were mostly sexual and since most people are sexual in some way or another, guilt was guaranteed. Infallible! The infallible rules for differentiating between the results of witchcraft and ordinary illnesses - any disease which the doctors could not cure was due to witchcraft.

The authors of the Malleus are a casebook study of the sexual psychopathology of typical religious authoritarian nuts in positions of power and projecting their own unconscious desires on their victims, e.g. "all witchcraft comes from carnal lust which in women is insatiable" and witches had intercourse with the Devil with the utmost lechery.

Witches now joined Eve as the bad mothers and antitype to the Virgin Mary. Infantile psychological decomposition.

The Protestants were just as bad. Luther in the Wittenberg sermons urged his followers to hunt and torture witches. Calvin advocated mass executions and thought the court at Geneva far too lenient.

those who want to condensed versions of MALLEUS MALEFICARUM can go here
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienciareal/cienciareal12.htm

posted December 02, 2007 09:16 AM         

The accused would then be implicated and asked incriminating and luring questions in a dexterous manner of trickery calculated to entangle most. Many manual's used and promulgated were by the grand inquisitor Bernardus Guidonis, the Author of Practica Inquisitionis (Practice of the Inquisition) and the Directorium Inquisitorum (Guideline for Inquisitors) completed by Nicolaus Eymerich, grand inquisitor of Aragon. These were the authoritative text-books for the use of inquisitors until the issue of Torquemada's instructions in 1483, which was an enlarged and revised Directorium.

Cardinal Giovanni Caraffa, a zealot for the purity of Catholicism who later became the pope himself, also held a stern and gloomy view of moral rectitude for heretics. In 1542, he was appointed by pope Paul III to administer the Inquisition.

1252, Pope Innocent IV officially authorized the creation of the horrifying Inquisition torture chambers. It also included anew perpetual imprisonment or death at the stake without the bishops consent. Acquittal of the accused was now virtually impossible. Thus, with a license granted by the pope himself, Inquisitors were free to explore the depths of horror and cruelty. Dressed as black-robed fiends with black cowls over their heads, Inquisitors could extract confessions from just about anyone. The Inquisition invented every conceivable devise to inflict pain by slowly dismembering and dislocating the body.

Many of the devices were inscribed with the motto "Glory be only to God." Bernardus Guidonis, the Inquisitor in Toulouse instructed the layman as to never argue with the unbeliever, but as to "thrust his sword into the man's belly as far as it will go." George Ryley Scott describes how the inquisitors, gorged with their inhumanity, and developed a degree of callousness rarely rivaled in the annals of civilization, with the ecclesiastical authorities condemning every faith outside of Christianity as demonic.

In the ages of faith, when the priest, was little less than a God himself, a curse from his lips was often more feared than physical torments. To even establish an accusation against a bishop itself required 72 witnesses; against a deacon was 27; against an inferior dignitary was 7, and for non-members of the clergy, 2 was sufficient to convict. Whole communities went mad with grief and fear of the thought towards being denounced to the Inquisition. It spread all over Europe. Men, women, and children, all legally murdered on evidence by a church, which today would only be accepted unless the court and jury specifically composed of the inmates of a lunatic asylum.

During the course, defendants had no rights to counsel or advice, and was even denied the right to know the names of their accusers. No favorable evidence or character witnesses were permitted. In any case, one who even spoke for an accused heretic would be arrested as an accomplice. Never would a prisoner of the Inquisition have seen the accusation against himself, or any other. All efforts relating to time, place, and person were carefully concealed.

Henry Charles Lea describes however that evidence was accepted from witnesses who could not legally testify in any other kind of trial; such as condemned criminals, other heretics, or children even as young as the age of two. The Inquisitor Jean Bodin (1529-96) author of De La Demonomanie des Sorciers (Of the Demonomania of Witches) especially valued child witnesses for extracting confessions, as they were easily persuaded to confess. Children though, were no exception for being prosecuted and tortured themselves. The treatment of witches' children was particularly brutal.

Suspicion alone of witchcraft would warrant torture. Once a girl was nine and a half, and a boy was ten and a half, they were both liable to inquiry. Younger children below this age were still nevertheless tortured to elicit testimonies that could be used against their own parents. A famous French magistrate was known to have regretted his leniency when, instead of having young children accused of witchcraft burned, he had only sentenced them to be flogged while they watched their parents burn.

The children of those parents murdered usually were force to beg in vain upon the streets, for no one dared feed or shelter them thus incurring a suspicion of heresy upon themselves. The suspicion was sufficient enough to drive away even the closest kindred and friends of the unfortunate. Sympathy for them would be interpreted as sympathy with their heresy.

The Inquisitors who wrote The Malleus Maleficarum, explained that women are more likely to become witches than men because the female sex is more concerned with things of the flesh than men; being formed from a man's rib, they are only "imperfect animals" and "crooked" whereas man belongs to a privileged sex from whose midst Christ emerged.

[[[ Burning Iron Chair:

consisted of sharpened iron nails that could be heated red hot from below.

The victim would be bound and then slowly roasted

posted December 02, 2007 09:19 AM         

"In our days there are no more rich heretics... it is a pity that so salutary an institution as ours should be so uncertain of its future."

The Inquisition exposed a whole new group of people from whom to collect money. It took every advantage of this opportunity.

The author Barbara Walker notes:

"Victims were charged for the very ropes that bound them and the wood that burned them. Each procedure of torture carried its fee. After the execution of a wealthy witch, officials usually treated themselves to a banquet at the expense of the victim's estate."

The process of formally persecuting witches followed the grinding inquisitional procedure. Once accused of witchcraft, it was virtually impossible to escape conviction. After cross-examination, the victim's body was examined for the witch's mark. The historian Walter Nigg described the process:

...she was stripped naked and the executioner shaved off all her body hair in order to seek in the hidden places of the body the sign which the devil imprinted on his cohorts.

Warts, freckles, and birthmarks were considered certain tokens of amorous relations with Satan. Should a woman show no sign of a witch's mark, guilt could still be established by methods such as sticking needles in the accused's eyes. The confession was then extracted by the hideous methods of torture already developed during earlier phases of the Inquisition.

"Loathe they are to confess without torture," wrote King James I in his Daemonologie.

A physician serving in witch prisons spoke of women driven half mad:

"by frequent torture... kept in prolonged squalor and darkness of their dungeons... and constantly dragged out to undergo atrocious torment until they would gladly exchange at any moment this most bitter existence for death, are willing to confess whatever crimes are suggested to them rather than to be thrust back into their hideous dungeon amid ever recurring torture."

Unless the witch died during torture, she was taken to the stake. Since many of the burnings took place in public squares, inquisitors prevented the victims from talking to the crowds by using wooden gags or cutting their tongues out.

[[ "What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother,

it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman...

I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function
of bearing children."

- Saint Augustine (the prominent pioneer of Western theology) ]]

The sexual mutilation of accused witches was not uncommon. With the orthodox understanding that divinity had little or nothing to do with the physical world, sexual desire was perceived to be unGodly. When the men persecuting the accused witches found themselves sexually aroused, they assumed that such desire emanated, not from themselves, but from the woman. They attacked breasts and genitals with pincers, pliers and red-hot irons.

Some rules pardoned sexual abuse by allowing men deemed "zealous Catholics" to visit female prisoners in solitary confinement while not allowing female visitors. The people of Toulouse were so convinced that the inquisitor Foulques de Saint-George arraigned women for no other reason than to sexually abuse them that they took the dangerous and unusual step of gathering evidence against him.

Old, wise healing women were particular targets for witch-hunters as well.

"At this day," wrote Reginald Scot in 1584, "it is indifferent to say in the English tongue, 'she is a witch' or 'she is a wise woman.'"

Common people of pre-reformational Europe relied upon wise women and men for the treatment of illness rather than upon churchmen, monks or physicians. Robert Burton wrote in 1621:

Sorcerers are too common; cunning men, wizards and white witches, as they call them, in every village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind.

By combining their knowledge of medicinal herbs with an entreaty for divine assistance, these healers provided both more affordable and most often more effective medicine than was available elsewhere. Churchmen of the Reformation objected to the magical nature of this sort of healing, to the preference people had for it over the healing that the Church or Church-licensed physicians offered, and to the power that it gave women. As a by-product of the witch hunts, the field of early medicine also transferred to exclusively male hands and the Western herbal tradition was largely destroyed.

posted December 02, 2007 09:23 AM         

The Archbishop of Treves burned a hundred and eighteen women and two men, from whom confessions had been extorted that their incantations had prolonged the winter. Paramo boasts that in a century and a half from the commencement of the sect, in 1404, the Holy Office had burned at least 30,000 witches. Cumanus, in Italy, burned 41 women in one province alone. Strasbourg, burned 5000 in a period of 20 years.

It was reported in 1518 when the Senate was officially informed that the inquisitor had burned 70 witches of the Valcamonica, that he had as many in his prisons, and that those suspected or accused amounted to about 5000, or one fourth of the inhabitants of the valleys. In Germany 500 were burned in 1515 and 1516. In 1524, 1000 females accused of being witches died at Como, and for several years subsequently, the number of victims exceeded 100 annually.

In France, about 1520, the fires for the execution of witches blazed in almost every town; in one township in Piedmont there was not a family that had not lost a member; at Verneuil in 1561, women were burned on the charged of having converted themselves into cats. The delusion spread like an epidemic through the villages. Many women were murdered by mobs. At Leith, in Scotland, 9 women were burned together in 1664; the bishops’ palaces of South Germany basically became shambles--the lordly prelates of Salzburg, Wurzburg, and Bamberg taking lead in the butchery.

The executioner of Neisse in Silesia even invented an oven in which he roasted to death 42 women and young girls in one year. Within 9 years he had roasted over a 1000 people, including children 2 to 4 years old. In Wurzburg many children were burned, some no older than 9 years.

posted December 02, 2007 09:27 AM         

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Medieval Torture Devices
Reaching its peak in the 12th century, torture was used in capital cases as well as against suspected heretics. From the mid-14th century to the end of the 18th century, torture was a common and sanctioned part of the legal proceedings of most European countries which was approved by the inquisition in cases of heresy.

The most common means of torture included burning, beating and suffocating, however the techniques below are some of the more extravagant and depraved methods used and allowed by the Roman Catholic Church.

The Heretics Fork
This instrument consisted of two little forks one set against the other, with the four prongs plunged into the flesh, under the chin and above the chest, with hands secured firmly behind their backs. A small collar supported the instrument in such a manner that the victims were usually forced to hold their head erect, thus preventing any movement.

The forks did not penetrate any vital points, and thus suffering was prolonged and death was always nearly avoided. The pointed prongs on each end to crane the persons head made speech or movement near impossible. The Heretics Fork was very common during the height of the Spanish Inquisition

The Pear
The pear was a torture device used on females. This device was inserted into the vagina, or mouth of the victim and then expanded by force of the screw to the maximum aperture setting of the victims cavity. The antrum would then irremediably become lacerated, nearly always fatally, ripping the tissue, flesh and membranes.

This item became extensively applied throughout the Spanish Inquisition to force confessions from those accused of Witchcraft. The pointed prongs at the end of the segments serve better to rip into the throat, the intestines or the cervix. Many paid dearly when the Pear was their fate.

The Branks
The Branks, also sometimes called Dame's Bridle, or Scold's Bridle comprised of a metal facial mask and spiked mouth depressor that was implemented on housewives up until the early 19th century. Many clergymen sustained in this husband's right to handle his wife, and to use "salutary restraints in every case of misbehavior" without the intervention of what some court records of 1824 referred to as "vexatious prosecutions."

Generally a husband would need only to accuse his wife of disagreeing with his decisions, at which the Branks could be applied. The subject would then be paraded through the streets, or chained to the market cross where she was exposed to public ridicule.

posted December 02, 2007 09:27 AM         

The Wheel
The wheel was one of the most popular and insidious methods of torture and execution practiced. The giant spiked wheel was able to break bodies as it rolled forward, causing the most agonizing and drawn-out death. Other forms include the "braided" wheel, where the victim would be tied to the execution dock or platform. Their limbs were spread and tied to stakes or iron rings on the ground. Slices of wood were placed under the main joints, wrists, ankles, knees, hips, and elbows. The executioner would then smash every joint with the iron-tyred edge of the wheel--however the executioner would avoid fatal blows to give the victim a painful death.

According to a German chronicler, the victim was transformed into a huge screaming puppet writhing in their own blood. It looked like a sea monster with four tentacles, and raw slimy shapeless flesh, mixed with splinters of bone. After the smashing had taken place the victim would literally be "braided" into the wheel and hung horizontally at the top of the pole.

The Breast Ripper
The name of this device speaks for itself. Women condemned of heresy, blasphemy, adultery, and witchcraft often felt the wrath of this device as it violently tore a breast from their torso.

posted December 02, 2007 09:28 AM         

Christian Excuses

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Christian apologists for what happened goes like this:

(1) Ignore, suppress and pass it over in silence. Keep the person in the pew ignorant of church history.

(2) "Luther was a child of his times." Answer.
Religion set the spirit and laws of the time.

(3) Admit in the vague and abstract, then minimise and play down the atrocities, but say they were not committed by "true" Christians.

(4) Reply: Every cruel act can be justified by direct unambiguous quotes from the bible. The principles of the Bible themselves are PERVERSE, like its practitioners.

(5) This one beats the lot: It was not the "witches" themselves, but the mad delusion of those who persecuted them that came from the Devil. The Inquisitorial judges were the deluded agents of Satan. (Nigg)

How does one refute that infallible argument, except to say that anyone who believes the fairy tales of the Christian religion are technically certifiable? But how and why have the Christians got away with their Orwellian lies for nearly 2000 years? The Christians, if they had the political power, would do the same again and do so in the drug laws.

THE DRUG LAWS

The drug laws are based not on the pharmacological harm of the drugs but authoritarian Christian and Moslem temperance religious wowsers getting control of the U.N.W.H.O. Narcotics Commission and determining drug policy for the whole world. The death penalty, confiscation of property and anonymous dobbing-in (Operation Noah) are world wide and have all the characteristics of the earlier world-wide heresy and witch hunts.

The same religious mentality.

PS. The loving Bible prescribes the death penalty for the following offences:

(1) Premarital promiscuity. Dt. 22:20-24
(2) Fornication. Hebrews 13:4, 1 Thes 4:3, Paul I Cor. 6:15, Rom 1:15-27
(3) Adultery. Dt. 22:22, Lv 20:10, 1 Cor 7:2 Exodus 20:14-17
(4) Homosexual intercourse. Lv 20:13
(5) Divorce. Mark 10:11,12, Matt 19:9, 1 Cor 6:9,10
(6) Bestiality. Lv 20:15,16
(7) Incest. Lv 20:11-14 along with.....
(8) Witches. Exodus 22:18, Dt 18:9
(9) Blasphemy. Lv 24:16
(10) Apostasy. Dt passim.l3.
(11) Defiance of parental authority. Dt 21:15-21
Paul accepts these, Rom 1:32, 7:3

posted December 03, 2007 11:04 PM         

I don't think that any religon is bad/negative, I think it is we humans and our interpretations that commit atrocities and use religion to justify it. Mind control,fear, guilt, all ways to obtain an effect.