For what it's worth I got 44/55 on the MCQ on the same practice test, or 80% Original is here https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-european-history-ced-practice-exam.pdf
You can also just do some or skim them if you don't have the time, which is understandable, 100% fine by me. Just be honest, that's all
FIRST SAQ
a. Napoleon's imposition of republican systems on various puppet states. During his wars of conquest, Napoleon would occupy various territories, and set up republics in them, for instance, the Batavian Republic. These were nepotistic in many ways, yet even so, they still partially preserved many of the ideals held by the Jacobins and other related parties. This ultimately shows a specific conflict: that of contemporary republicanism vs. traditional monarchism, which would go on to be a defining ideological issue later on in the century.
b. Napoleon's authoritarian policies. Consolidating his territories, he would institute various laws, such as the Napoleonic Code, building an efficient bureaucracy to maintain them. However, these laws not only reflected traditional treatment of groups such as women, but also were backed up by actions such as the repression of the press, and Napoleon's later coronation as emperor. These actions reeked of tradition, calling back to the older monarchies of Europe, rather than the modern parliamentary states.
c. The Nazi occupation of large portions of Europe. In 1939, having previously annexed Czechoslovakia and Austria, Germany would declare war on Poland, thus setting World War II into motion. They occupied large swathes of territory, and would force their own ideological ideals of national and racial superiority onto others. They attempted to create a new Europe, essentially, dominated by "superior" peoples, but they found great resistance from the masses, who resented these policies, wanting to maintain their old conceptions of nationality. This shows how the struggle between the Nazis and other groups was focused on imposing something new on others who had preferred traditional methods, similar to how Napoleon's newer ideas were not well received by some of the territories he conquered, who preferred older ways.
SECOND SAQ
a. The increase in population brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The discovery of new technology such as the steam engine and of agricultural implements such as the seed drill (from the Agricultural Revolution, closely linked to the Industrial Revolution) allowed for more food, which naturally meant more people could fed, which led to a higher populaton. Cities like Vienna would want to accomodate the growing masses of people who were to live in their realms, and would act accordingly, embarking on infrastructural projects such as the one shown in the map to do so.
b. An attempt to encourage centralization. Austria at this time was composed of many different ethnic groups, including but not limited to Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Croats, and others. They had little in common, and this caused issues, especially in Bohemia and Hungary. To help combat this, Austria may have wanted to make their capital seem grander and more luxurious in a way, which would encourage nationalism (a rising trend around this time) and to hopefully keep the country together. This shows a trend in which countries would increasingly focus on centralization, as seen even in areas such as Germany, which would later unite in 1871.
c. The de-emphasis of luxury in narrow areas, as opposed to "specialized" areas instead. Vienna, like many other cities in Europe is very old, and most of the streets are narrow and organically made. People seemed to have been comfortable with this previously, yet as the 19th century developed, new ideas on architecture began to grow in popularity, as people advocated for the creation of areas specifically designed for leisure and similar purposes. This is indicative of the fact that people saw cities less as natural phenomenons, but more like artificial constructs which could be efficiently managed and built, similar to, say, Hausmann's architectural rennovations in Paris.
THIRD SAQ
a. Parliament went from supporting intersections between church and state to outright despising it. Around 1517, when Martin Lutther released his Ninety-Five Theses, England was still Catholic, and Henry VIII even published a pamphlet defending the Catholic faith. However, around 1533, when the Church refused to annull his marriage, he established the Anglican Church, becoming Protestant and breaking from Catholicism. However, the English government still had a close relationship with the church. This would change with the rise of movements such as Puritanism, a vaguely Calvinist movement. The Puritans believed the Anglican Church was corrupt in many ways, and some, namely the Pilgrims, even advocated total separation. Puritans were well represented in Parliament, which allowed them to attack the church from the state, which ultimately culminated in the English Civil War, and the beheading of Charles I. This demonstrates that overtime, Parliament (the state) turned against Anglicanism (the church), showing a marked separation of church and state.
b. The English Civil War did not really end religious laws in the country. As was typical of every country at the time, 16th century England possessed numerous religious laws, including some based around heresy. This did not change with the rise of the Puritans, who established strict religious laws of their own, for example, restricting the rights of Roman Catholics. The continuity here is that religious ideas still held massive sway when it came to English law.
c. A disillusionment with religious rule. Both the Reformation and the English Civil War had religious undercurrents, with the Reformation promising a return to a purer form of Christianity, and the English Civil War partially centered around the idea that the king was leading a "popish" (pro-Catholic) plot to restore the religion in the country. Later philosophers including Thomas Hobbes and John Locke would have seen these conflicts, with the hindsight to judge them, and would begin proposing newer ideas of governing which were not based on religion. This shows that the damage caused by tension between these two groups came to such a severe extent that some began seeing secularism as a possible solution, which would be adopted later on in England.
DBQ
Even though old attitudes towards women continued to persist, overall, World War I greatly changed the lives of European women, as shown by the increased involvement of women in manufacturing, and their heightened participation in conflict.
Traditionally, women in Europe had restricted rights. They could neither properly represent themselves legally, nor vote. Wives were thought to be subservient to their husbands, and only suitable for domestic duties. The Victorian ideal of a perfect wife was one who would constantly occupy herself with housework and maintaining order in the family. Women who tried other roles were considered rough, tomboyish, or rustic, which were all seen as negative qualities. In a nutshell, they were second class citizens. Some, especially wealthier women, would gain respect as cultured authors, examples include Jane Austen and George Sand (who had to use a male pseudonym). However, overall, women were simply seen as inferior to men, who controlled the bureaucratic structures of Europe. Yet, less than a decade after WWI, many European countries granted women the right to vote.
The magazine Votes for Women published an article on November 26, 1915, which shows a woman personifying the concept of chivalry presenting the idea of women's equality to a man, who is advocating for more political representation for soldiers (Document 1). Now this is a political cartoon in a newspaper, and so it was meant to reach a broader audience of politically informed citizens. It is worth pointing out that this was published shortly after the sinking of the Anglia, in which female nurses died prioritizing wounded servicemen. The idea was that women were simply dignified enough to obtain legal equality, and that changes in legislation were overdue because of this, an idea the newspaper would've been effective enough at promoting. In addition, a memoir written by Maria Botchkareva in 1919 explains her life as a peasant and an officer (Document 6). This is as close to a direct perspective as you can get, it quite literally comes from a woman who experienced the war first-hand. Botchkareva explains that although man of the men in her unit were hesitant to advance, the women were brave enough to do so, showing that women were just as capable in military matters as men were, thus providing a justification for women to vote. Seeing as all the men had left for war, women had taken up manufacturing roles, being 40.4% of the industrial workforce in France in 1917 (Document 7). This reflects the increased involvement of women in manufacturing jobs. Countess de Courson's book The French Woman during the War, published in 1916, shows how difficult maintaining the war effort was for many peasant women, and their resolve to continue to do so anyways (Document 3). Again, this is evidence of the fact that women were seen as capable contributors to their homelands, another justification for giving them the right to vote. Madeline Ida Bedford wrote a poem in 1917 showing the upwards economic mobility of women during the war (Document 4). This helps support the idea that women had a greater and more significant role in economic affairs, related to manufacturing. Finally, it is worth pointing out that the war left many wives alone from their husbands. This undoubtedly gave them a large amount of time to reflect over societal conditions, and aided the rise of the suffragette movement as they had more time to think independently.
The counter-argument to be held, supported by two pieces of evidence, argues that the war was ultimately insignificant in transforming the role of women. The first comes from Paul von Hindenburg's letter to German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in 1916, arguing that women shouldn't be encouraged to pursue various occupations, and that they were only really suited for specific ones (Document 2). However, Hindenburg, though an important general, was extremely conservative (and old). Therefore, his views are not sufficiently representative of contemporary European trends. As a matter of fact, by arguing against the trend of women's involvement in manufacturing and war, he implicitly confirms his existence, only further advancing the pro-change argument. There is also a letter from G. F. Wilby to his fiancée Ethel Baxter in 1918, arguing that she should continue with her feminine occupations, and not meddle in what he considered masculine affairs (Document 5). Wilby, however, was just a private, and although any source of historical information can be valuable, again, one private is not totally representative of the ideas of the general population. Even then, in the same manner as Hindenburg, Wilby supports the idea that the condition of women changed significantly during the war, as by arguing against it, again, he implicitly supports it.
LEQ
The Italian Renaissance focused on human beings as ends to themselves, whereas the Northern Renaissance focused more on people's connection to God and religion, as seen by the advocacy of thinkers such as Petrarch of a better understanding of the human condition, and the advocacy of thinkers like Erasmus of "purification" and a closer connection to God.
Italy before the Renaissance was dominated by city states which had grown into greater powers. Examples include Florence, Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, and others. These states were representative republics (although sometimes despotates) in theory, but oligarchies in practice. Furthermore, even if it hadn't existed in almost a millennium, the shadow of the Roman Empire lurked on the states and their culture. This emphasized both indivdualism and an obsession with classical Rome/Greece. Meanwhile, northern Europe was largely composed of monarchies with close ties to the Catholic Church. Controversies over issues such as indulgences and tithes may well have resulted in increased religious dialogue, various criticisms, and the exploration of newer paths in regards to Christianity.
When Petrarch discovered Cicero's letters to Athens, it helped spark a revolution in Italian thought. People began to abandon the old scholastic trifecta of law, medicine, and theology, for example, but instead adopted the study logic, rhetoric, and grammar. This, combined with the neo-Platonist idea that various concepts such as beauty transcended life, and that humans could understand these concepts, gave birth to humanism, which in turn sparked the Italian Renaissance. This put special emphasis on human beings, who were now seen as special and worthy of study. This is in contrast to the Northern Renaissance. As the power of the Italian city states began to decline in the late 15th century, many of the ideas spread beyond the Alps to areas such as the Holy Roman Empire, which helped create the Northern Renaissance. However, unlike the Italian Renaissance, the Northern Renaissance focused more on religious subjects. Erasmus, a Catholic nonetheless, frequently criticized the actions of the pope, and wrote In Praise of Folly as a criticism of Christianity in his era.
Now although religion was an element of the Italian Renaissance, as the peninsula remained devoutly Catholic and ancient works were even interpreted under religious lenses, it was in a humanistic framework. The fact that people were so willing to emulate pagans shows that religious scruples were not really that significant, and the main focus of humanism, and by extension the Italian Renaissance, was still, by the end of the day, the human being. This is also seen in Italian depictions of God, which portrayed him in a similar manner to Zeus, with a prominent white beard. The thinkers of the Northern Renaissance were also not entirely opposed to humanism, however, they did not view the human as important of an end goal as God and the Christian faith.

VIII: The Flight from Feeling: Sociopsychology of the Sex War
The Trivialization of Personal Relations
Bertrand Russell once predicted that the socialization of reproduction - the supersession of the family by the state - would “make sex love itself more trivial,” encourage “a certain triviality in all personal relations,” and “make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s own death.” At first glance, recent developments appear to have refuted the first part of this prediction. Americans today invest personal relations, particularly the relations between men and women, with undiminished emotional importance. The decline of childrearing as a major preoccupation has freed sex from its bondage to procreation and made it possible for people to value erotic life for its own sake. As the family shrinks to the marital unit, it can be argued that men and women respond more readily to each other’s emotional needs, instead of living vicariously through their offspring. The marriage contract having lost its binding character, couples now find it possible, according to many observers, to ground sexual relations in something more solid than legal compulsion. In short, the growing determination to live for the moment, whatever it may have done to the relations between parents and children, appears to have established the preconditions of a new intimacy between men and women.
This appearance is an illusion. The cult of intimacy conceals a growing despair of finding it. Personal relations crumble under the emotional weight with which they are burdened. The inability “to take an interest in anything after one’s own death,” which gives such urgency to the pursuit of close personal encounters in the present, makes intimacy more elusive than ever. The same developments that have weakened the tie between parents and children have also undermined relations between men and women. Indeed the deterioration of marriage contributes in its own right to the deterioration of care for the young.
This last point is so obvious that only a strenuous propaganda on behalf of “open marriage” and “creative divorce” prevents us from grasping it. It is clear, for example, that the growing incidence of divorce, together with the ever present possibility that any given marriage will end in collapse, adds to the instability of family life and deprives the child of a measure of emotional security. Enlightened opinion diverts attention from this general fact by insisting that in specific cases, parents may do more harm to their children by holding a marriage together than by dissolving it. It is true that many couples preserve their marriage, in one form or another, at the expense of the child. Sometimes they embark on a life full of distractions that shield them against daily emotional involvements with their offspring. Sometimes one parent acquiesces in the neurosis of the other (as in the family configuration that produces so many schizophrenic patients) for fear of disturbing the precarious peace of the household. More often the husband abandons his children to the wife whose company he finds unbearable, and the wife smothers the children with incessant yet perfunctory attentions. This particular solution to the problem of marital strain has become so common that the absence of the father impresses many observers as the most striking fact about the contemporary family. Under these conditions, a divorce in which the mother retains custody of her children merely ratifies the existing state of affairs - the effective emotional desertion of his family by the father. But the reflection that divorce often does no more damage to children than marriage itself hardly inspires rejoicing.
Battle of the Sexes: Its Social History
While the escalating war between men and women have psychological roots in the disintegration of the marital relation, and more broadly in the changing patterns of socialization outlined in the preceding chapter, much of this tension can be explained without reference to psychology. The battle of the sexes also constitutes a social phenomena with a history of its own. The reasons for the recent intensification of sexual combat lie in the transformation of capitalism from its paternalistic and familial form to a managerial, corporate, bureaucratic system of almost total control: more specifically, in the collapse of “chivalry”; the liberation of sex from many of its former constraints; the pursuit of sexual pleasure as an end in itself; the emotional overloading of personal relations; and most important of all, the irrational male response to the emergence of the liberated woman.
It has been clear for some time that “chivalry is dead.” The tradition of gallantry formerly masked and to some degree mitigated the organized oppression of women. While males monopolized political and economic power, they made their domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and politesse. They set themselves up as protectors of the weaker sex, and this cloying but useful fiction set limits to their capacity to exploit women through sheer physical force. The counterconvention of droit de seigneur, which justified the predatory exploits of the privileged classes against women socially inferior to themselves, nevertheless showed that the male sex at no time ceased to regard most women as fair game. The long history of rape and seduction, moreover, served as a reminder that animal strength remained the basis of masculine ascendancy, manifested here in its most direct and brutal form. Yet polite conventions, even when they were no more than a façade, provided women with ideological leverage in their struggle to domesticate the wildness and savagery of men. They surrounded essentially exploitive relationships with a network of reciprocal obligations, which if nothing else made exploitation easier to bear.
The symbiotic interdependence of exploiters and exploited, so characteristic of paternalism in all ages, survived in male-female relations long after the collapse of patriarchal authority in other areas. Because the convention of deference to the fair sex was so closely bound up with paternalism, however, it lived on borrowed time once the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had destroyed the last foundations of feudalism. The decline of paternalism, and of the rich public ceremonial formerly associated with it, spelled the end of gallantry. Women themselves began to perceive the connection between their debasement and their sentimental exaltation, rejected their confining position on the pedestal of masculine adoration, and demanded the demystification of female sexuality.
Democracy and feminism have now stripped the veil of courtly convention from the subordination of women, revealing the sexual antagonisms formerly concealed by the “feminine mystique.” Denied illusions of comity, men and women find it more difficult than before to confront each other as friends and lovers, let alone as equals. As male supremacy becomes ideologically untenable, incapable of justifying itself as protection, men assert their domination more directly, in fantasies and occasionally in acts of raw violence. Thus the treatment of women in movies, according to one study, has shifted “from reverence to rape.”
Women who abandon the security of well-defined though restrictive social roles have always exposed themselves to sexual exploitation, having surrendered the usual claims of respectability. Mary Wollstonecraft, attempting to live as a free woman, found herself brutally deserted by Gilbert Imlay. Later feminists forfeited the privileges of sex and middle-class origin when they campaigned for women’s rights. Men reviled them publicly as sexless “she-men” and approached them privately as loose women. A Cincinnati brewer, expecting to be admitted to Emma Goldman’s hotel room when he found her alone, became alarmed when she threatened to wake the whole establishment. He protested, “I thought you believed in free love.” Ingrid Bengis reports that when she hitchhiked across the country, men expected her to pay for rides with sexual favors. Her refusal elicited the predictable reply: “Well, girls shouldn’t hitchhike in the first place.”
What distinguishes the present time from the past is that defiance of sexual conventions less and less presents itself as a matter of individual choice, as it was for the pioneers of feminism. Since most of those conventions have already collapsed, even a woman who lays no claim to her rights nevertheless finds it difficult to claim the traditional privileges of her sex. All women find themselves identified with “women’s lib” merely by virtue of their sex, unless by strenuous disavowals they identify themselves with its enemies. All women share in the burdens as well as the benefits of “liberation,” both of which can be summarized by saying that men no longer treat women as ladies.
The Sexual “Revolution”
The demystification of womanhood goes hand in hand with the desublimation of sexuality. The “repeal of reticence” has dispelled the aura of mystery surrounding sex and removed most of the obstacles to its public display. Institutionalized sexual segregation has given way to arrangements that promote the intermingling of the sexes at every stage of life. Efficient contraceptives, legalized abortion, and a “realistic” and “healthy” acceptance of the body have weakened the links that once tied sex to love, marriage, and procreation. Men and women now pursue sexual pleasure as an end in itself, unmediated even by the conventional trappings of romance.
Sex valued purely for its own sake loses all reference to the future and brings no hope of permanent relationships. Sexual liaisons, including marriage, can be terminated at pleasure. This means, as Willard Waller demonstrated a long time ago, that lovers forfeit the right to be jealous or to insist on fidelity as a condition of erotic union. In his sociological satire of the recently divorced, Waller pointed out that the bohemians of the 1920s attempted to avoid emotional commitments while eliciting them from others.
Since the bohemian was “not ready to answer with his whole personality for the consequences of the affair, nor to give any assurance of its continuance,” he lost the right to demand such an assurance from others. “To show jealousy,” under these conditions, became “nothing short of a crime…. So if one falls in love in Bohemia, he conceals it from his friends as best he can.” In similar studies of the “rating and dating complex” on college campuses, Waller found that students who fell in love invited the ridicule of their peers. Exclusive attachments have way to an easygoing promiscuity as the normal pattern of sexual relations. Popularity replaced purity as the measure of a woman’s social value; the sentimental cult of virginity gave way to “playful woman-sharing,” which had “no negative effect,” as Wolfenstein and Leites pointed out in their study of movies, “on the friendly relations between the men.”(*) In the thirties and forties, the cinematic fantasy in which a beautiful girl dances with a chorus of men, favoring one no more than the others, expressed an ideal to which reality more and more closely conformed. In Elmtown’s Youth, August Hollingshead described a freshman girl who violated conventional taboos against drinking, smoking, and “fast” behavior and still retained her standing in the school’s most prominent clique, partly carefully calibrated promiscuity. “To be seen with her adds to a boy’s prestige in the elite peer group…. she pets with her dates discreetly never goes too far, just far enough to make them come back again.” In high school as in college, the peer group attempts through conventional ridicule and vituperation to prevent its members from falling in love with the wrong people, indeed from falling in love at all; for as Hollingshead noted, lovers “are lost to the adolescent world with its quixotic enthusiasms and varied group activities.”
These studies show that the main features of the contemporary sexual scene had already established themselves well before the celebrated “sexual revolution” of the sixties and seventies: casual promiscuity, a wary avoidance of emotional commitments, an attack on jealousy and possessiveness. Recent developments, however, have introduced a new source of tension: the modern woman’s increasingly insistent demand for sexual fulfillment. In the 1920s and 1930s, many women still approached sexual encounters with a hesitance that combined prudery and a realistic fear of consequences. Superficially seductive, they took little pleasure in sex even when they spoke the jargon of sexual liberation and professed to live for pleasure and thrills. Doctors worried about female frigidity, and psychiatrists had no trouble in recognizing among their female patients the classic patterns of hysteria described by Freud, in which a coquettish display of sexuality often coexists with powerful repression and a rigid, puritanical morality.
Today women have dropped much of their sexual reserve. In the eyes of men, this makes them more accessible as sexual partners but also more threatening. Formerly men complained about women’s lack of sexual response; now they find this response intimidating and agonize about their capacity to satisfy it. “I’m sorry they ever found out they could have orgasms too,” Heller’s Bob Slocum says. The famous Masters-Johnson report on female sexuality added to these anxieties by depicting women as sexually insatiable, inexhaustible in their capacity to experience orgasm after orgasm. Some feminists have used the Masters report to attack the “myth of vaginal orgasm,” to assert women’s independence of men, or to taunt men with their sexual inferiority. “Theoretically, a woman could go on having orgasms indefinitely if physical exhaustion did not intervene,” writes Mary Jane Sherfey. According to Kate Millett, “While the male’s sexual potential is limited, the female’s appears to be biologically nearly inexhaustible.” Sexual “performance” thus becomes another weapon in the war between men and women; social inhibitions no longer prevent women from exploiting the tactical advantage which the current obsession with sexual measurement has given them. Whereas the hysterical woman, even when she fell in love and longed to let herself go, seldom conquered her underlying aversion to sex, the pseudoliberated woman of Cosmopolitan exploits her sexuality in a more deliberate and calculating way, not only because she has fewer reservations about sex but because she manages more successfully to avoid emotional entanglements. “Women with narcissistic personalities,” writes Otto Kernberg, “may appear quite ‘hysterical’ on the surface, with their extreme coquettishness and exhibitionism but the cold, shrewdly calculating quality of their seductiveness is in marked contrast to the much warmer, emotionally involved quality of hysterical pseudo-hypersexuality.”
[*. The transition in American movies from the vamp to the “good-bad girl,” according to Wolfenstein and Leites, illustrates the decline of jealousy and the displacement of sexual passion by sexiness. “The dangerousness of the vamp was associated with the man’s intolerance for sharing her with other men. Her seductive appearance and readiness for love carried a strong suggestion that there has been and might be other men in her life…. The good-bad girl is associated with a greater tolerance for sharing the woman…. In effect, the woman’s attraction is enhanced by her association with other men. All that is needed to eliminate unpleasantness is the assurance that those relations were not serious.”]
Togetherness
Both men and women have come to approach personal relations with a heightened appreciation of their emotional risks. Determined to manipulate the emotions of others while protecting themselves against emotional injury, both sexes cultivate a protective shallowness, a cynical detachment they do not altogether feel but which soon becomes habitual and in any case embitters personal relations merely through its repeated profession. At the same time, people demand from personal relations the richness and intensity of a religious experience. Although in some ways men and women have had to modify their demands on each other, especially in their inability to exact commitments of lifelong sexual fidelity, in other ways they demand more than ever. In the American middle class, moreover, men and women see too much of each other and find it hard to put their relations in proper perspective. The degradation of work and the impoverishment of communal life force people to turn to sexual excitement to satisfy all their emotional needs. Formerly sexual antagonism was tempered not only by chivalric, paternalistic, conventions but by a more relaxed acceptance of the limitations of the other sex. Men and women acknowledged each other’s shortcomings without making them the basis of a comprehensive indictment. Partly because they found more satisfaction than is currently available in casual relations with their own sex, they did not have to raise friendship itself into a political program, an ideological alternative to love. An easygoing, everyday contempt for the weaknesses of the other sex, institutionalized as folk wisdom concerning the emotional incompetence of men or the brainlessness of women, kept sexual enmity within bounds and prevented it from becoming an obsession.
Feminism and the ideology of intimacy have discredited the sexual stereotypes which kept women in their place but which also made it possible to acknowledge sexual antagonism without raising it to the level of all-out warfare. Today the folklore of sexual differences and the acceptance of sexual friction survive only in the working class. Middle-class feminists envy the ability of working-class women to acknowledge that men get in their way without becoming man-haters. “These women are less angry at their men because they don’t spend that much time with them,” according to one observer. “Middle-class women are the ones who were told men had to be their companions.”
…
Strategies of Accommodation
Because the contradiction exposed (and exacerbated) by feminism are so painful, the feminist movement has always found it tempting to renounce its own insights and program and to retreat into some kind of accommodation with the existing order, often disguised as embattled militancy. In the nineteenth century, American feminists edged away from their original programs, which envisioned not only economic equality but a sweeping reform of marriage and sexual relations, into a protracted campaign for woman suffrage. Today many feminists argue, once again in the name of political realism, that women need to establish their influence within the two-party system, as a kind of loyal opposition, before they can raise broader issues. Such tactics merely serve to postpone the discussion of broader issues indefinitely. Just as the women’s rights movement of the nineteenth century drew back from discussions of love and marriage when they met with public hostility, so strong forces in the National Organization for Women today propose to improve woman’s image, to show that feminism in no way threatens men, and to blame “social conditions” or bad attitudes, not male supremacy, for the subordination of the female sex.
More subtle forms of accommodation pose as radical challenges to mainstream feminism and the status quo. Some militants have revived discredited theories of matriarchal origins or myths of the moral superiority of women, thereby consoling themselves for this lack of power. They appear to the illusory solidarity of sisterhood in order to avoid arguments about the proper goals of the feminist movement. By institutionalizing women’s activities as “alternatives to the male death-culture,” they avoid challenging that culture and protect women from the need to compete with men for jobs, political power, and public attention. What began as a tactical realization that women have to win their rights without waiting for men to grant them has degenerated into the fantasy of a world without men. As one critic has noted, the movement’s “apparent vigor turns out to be mere busyness with self-perpetuating make-work: much of it serving in the short run to provide its more worldly experts with prestige, book contracts, and grants, its dreamers with an illusory matriarchal utopia.”
“Radical lesbians” carry the logic of separation to its ultimate futility, withdrawing at every level from the struggle against male domination while directing a steady stream of abuse against men and against women who refuse to acknowledge their homosexual proclivities. Proclaiming their independence from men, militant lesbians in fact envision a protected enclave for themselves within a male-dominated society. Yet this form of surrender - the dream of an island secure against male intrusion - remains attractive to women who repeatedly fail to find a union of sexuality and tenderness in their relations with men. As such disappointments become more and more common, sexual separatism commends itself as the most plausible substitute for liberation.
All these strategies of accommodation derive their emotional energy from an impulse much more prevalent than feminism: the flight from feeling. For many reasons, personal relations have become increasingly risky - most obviously, because they no longer carry any assurance of permanence. Men and women make extravagant demands on each other and experience irrational rage and hatred when their demands are not met. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that more and more people long for emotional detachment or “enjoy sex,” as Hendin writes, “only in situations where they can define and limit the intensity of the relationship.” A lesbian confesses: “The only men I’ve ever been able to enjoy sex with were men I didn’t give a shit about. Then I could let go, because I didn’t feel vulnerable.”
Sexual separatism is only one of many strategies for controlling or escaping from strong feeling. Many prefer the escape of drugs, which dissolve anger and desire in a glow of good feeling and create the illusion of intense experience without emotion. Others simply undertake to live alone, repudiating connections with either sex. The reported increase in single-member households undoubtedly reflects a new taste for personal independence, but it also expresses a revulsion against close emotional attachments of any kind. The rising rate of suicide among young people can be attributed, in part, to the same flight from emotional entanglements. Suicide, in Hendin’s words, represents the “ultimate numbness.”
The most prevalent form of escape from emotional complexity is promiscuity: the attempt to achieve a strict separation between sex and feeling. Here again, escape masquerades as liberation, regression as progress. The progressive ideology of “nonbiding commitments” and “cool sex” makes a virtue of disengagement, while purporting to criticize the depersonalization of sex. Enlightened authorities like Alex Comfort, Nena and George O’Neill, Robert and Anna Francoeur insist on the need to humanize sex by making it into a “total experience” instead of a mechanical performance; yet in the same breath they condemn the human emotions of jealousy and possessiveness and decry “romantic illusions.” “Radical” therapeutic wisdom urges men and women to express their needs and wishes without reserve - since all needs and wishes have equal legitimacy - but warns them not to expect a single mate to satisfy them. This program seeks to allay emotional tensions, in effect, by reducing the demands men and women make on each other, instead of making men and women better able to meet them. The promotion of sex as a “healthy,” “normal” part of life masks a desire to divest it of the emotional intensity that unavoidably clings to it: the reminders of earlier entanglements with parents, the “unhealthy” inclination to re-create those relations in relation with lovers. The enlightened insistence that sex is not “dirty” expresses a wish to sanitize it by washing away its unconscious associations.
The humanistic critique of sexual “depersonalization” thus sticks to the surface of the problem. Even while preaching the need to combine sex with feeling, it gives ideological legitimacy to the protective withdrawal from strong emotions. It condemns the overemphasis on technique while extolling sexual relations that are hermetically free of affect. It exhorts men and women to “get in touch with their feelings” but encourages them to make “resolutions about freedom and ‘non-possessiveness,’” as Ingrid Bengis writes, which “tear the very heart out of intimacy.” It satirizes the crude pornographic fantasies sold by the mass media, which idealize hairless women with inflated mammaries, but it does so out of an aversion to fantasy itself, which so rarely conforms to social definition of what is healthy minded. The critics of dehumanized sex, like the critics of sport, hope to abolish spectatorship and to turn everyone into a participant, hoping that vigorous exercise will drive away unwholesome thoughts. They attack pornography, not because they wish to promote more complicated and satisfying fantasies about sex, but because, on the contrary, they wish to win acceptance for a realistic view of womanhood and of the reduced demands that men and women have a right to make of each other.
The Castrating Woman of Male Fantasy
The flight from feeling, whether or not it tries to justify itself under an ideology of nonbinding commitments, takes the form above all of a flight from fantasy. This shows that it represents more than defensive reaction to external disappointments. Today men and women seek escape from emotion not only because they have suffered too many wounds in the wars of love but because they experience their own inner impulses as intolerably urgent and menacing. The flight from feeling originates not only in the sociology of the sex war but in the psychology that accompanies it. If “many of us,” as Ingrid Bengis observes of women and as others have observed of men as well, “have had to anesthetize ourselves to [our] needs,” it is the very character of those needs (and of the defenses erected against them) which gives rise to the belief that they cannot be satisfied in heterosexual relations - perhaps should not be satisfied in any form - and which therefore prompts people to withdraw from intense emotional encounters.
Instinctual desires always threaten psychic equilibrium and for this reason can never be given direct expression. In our society, however, they present themselves as intolerably menacing, in part because the collapse of authority has removed so many of the external prohibitions against the expression of dangerous impulses. The superego can no longer ally itself, in its battle against impulse, with outside authorities. It has to rely almost entirely on its own resources, and these too have diminished in their effectiveness. Not only have the social agents of repression lost much of their force, but their internal representations in the superego have suffered a similar decline. The ego ideal, which cooperates in the work of repression by making socially acceptable behavior itself an object of libidinal cathexis, has become increasingly pallid and ineffective in the absence of compelling moral models outside the self. This means, as we have seen, that the superego has to rely more and more on harsh, punitive dictation, drawing on the aggressive impulses in the id and directing them against the ego.
The narcissist feels consumed by his own appetites. The intensity of his oral hunger leads him to make inordinate demands on his friends and sexual partners; yet in the same breath he repudiates those demands asks only a causal connection without promise of permanence on either side. He longs to free himself from his own hunger and rage, to achieve a calm detachment beyond emotion, and to outgrow his dependence on others. He longs for the indifference to human relationships and to life itself that would enable him to acknowledge its passing in Kurt Vonnegut’s laconic phrase, “So it goes,” which so aptly expresses the ultimate aspiration of the psychiatric seeker. <“Western” Buddhism>
But although the psychological man of our times frightens himself with the intensity of his inner needs, the needs of others appall him no less than his own. One reason the demands he inadvertently imposes on others make him uneasy is that they may justify other in making demands on himself. Men especially fear the demands of women, not only because women no longer hesitate to press them but because men find it so difficult to imagine an emotional need that does not wish to consume whatever it seizes on.
Women today ask for two things in their relations with men: sexual satisfaction and tenderness. Whether separately or in combination, both demands seem to convey to many males the same message - that women are voracious, insatiable. Why should men respond in this fashion to demands that reason tells them have obvious legitimacy? Rational arguments notoriously falter in the face of unconscious anxieties; women’s sexual demands terrify men because they reverberate at such deep layers of the masculine mind, calling up early fantasies of a possessive, suffocating, devouring, and castrating mother. The persistence of such fantasies in later life intensifies and brings into the open the secret terror that has always been an important part of the male image of womanhood. The strength of these pre-Oedipal fantasies, in the narcissistic type of personality, makes it likely that men will approach women with hopelessly divided feelings, dependent and demanding in their fixation on the breast but terrified of the vagina which threatens to eat them alive; of the legs with which popular imagination endows the American heroine, legs which can presumably strangle or scissor victims to death; of the dangerous, phallic breast itself, encased in unyielding armor, which in unconscious terror more nearly resembles an implement of destruction that a source of nourishment. The sexually voracious female, long a stock figure of masculine pornography, in the twentieth century has emerged into the daylight of literary respectability. Similarly the cruel, destructive, domineering woman, la belle dame sans merci, has moved from the periphery of literature and the other arts to a position close to the center. Formerly a source of delicious titillation, of sadomasochistic gratification tinged with horrified fascination, she now inspires unambiguous loathing and dread. Heartless, domineering, burning (as Leslie Fiedler has said) with “a lust of the nerves rather than of the flesh,” she unmans every man who falls under her spell. In American fiction, she assumes a variety of guides, all of them variations on the same theme: the bitchy heroine of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzegerald; Nathanael West’s Faye Greener, whose “invitation wasn’t to pleasure but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love”; Tennessee Williams’s Maggie Tolliver, edgy as a cat on a hot tin roof; the domineering wife whose mastery of her husband, as in the joyless humor of James Thurber, recalls the mastery of the castrating mother over her son; the man-eating Mom denounced in the shrill falsetto of Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, Wright Morris’s Man and Boy, Edward Albee’s The American Dream; the suffocating Jewish mother, Mrs. Portnoy; the Hollywood vampire (Theda Bara), scheming seductress (Marlene Dietrich), or bad blonde (Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield); the precocious female killer of William March’s The Bad Seed.
Child or woman, wife or mother, this female cuts men to ribbons or swallows them whole. She travels accompanied by eunuchs, by damaged men suffering from nameless wounds, or by a few strong men brought low by their misguided attempts to turn her into a real woman. Whether or not the actual incidence of impotence has increased in American males - and there is no reason to doubt reports that it has - the specter of impotence haunts the contemporary imagination, not least because it focuses the fear that a played-out Anglo-Saxon culture is about to fall before the advance of hardier races. The nature of impotence, moreover, has undergone an important historical shift. In the nineteenth century, respectable men sometimes experienced embarrassing sexual failures with women of their own class, or else suffered from what Freud called “psychic impotence” - the characteristic Victorian split between sensuality and affection. Although most of these men dutifully had intercourse with their wives, they derived sexual satisfaction only from intercourse with prostitutes or with women otherwise degraded. As Freud explained, this psychic syndrome - “the most prevalent form of degradation” in the erotic life of his time - originated in the Oedipus complex. After the painful renunciation of the mother, sensuality seeks only those objects that evoke no reminder of her, while the mother herself, together with other “pure” (socially respectable) women, is idealized beyond reach of the sensual.
Today, impotence typically seems to originate not in renunciation of the mother but in earlier experiences, often reactivated by the apparently aggressive overtures of sexually liberated women. Fear of the devouring mother of pre-Oedipal fantasy gives rise to a generalized fear of women that has little resemblance to the sentimental adoration men once granted to women who made them sexually uncomfortable. The fear of women, closely associated with a fear of the consuming desires within, reveals itself not only as impotence but as a boundless rage against the female sex. This blind and impotent rage, which seems so prevalent at the present time, only superficially represents a defensive male reaction against feminism. It is only because the recent revival of feminism stirs up such deeply rooted memories that it gives rise to such primitive emotions. Men’s fear of women, moreover, exceeds the actual threat to their sexual privileges. Whereas the resentment of women against men for the most part has solid roots in the discrimination and sexual danger to which women are constantly exposed, the resentment of men against women, when men still control most of the power and wealth in society yet feel themselves threatened on every hand - intimidated, emasculated - appears deeply irrational, and for that reason not likely to be appeased by changes in feminist tactics designed to reassure men that liberated women threaten no one. When even Mom is a menace, there is not much that feminists can say to soften the sex war or to assure their adversaries that men and women will live happily together when it is over.

People group women who are anti sex work, anti porn, etc with TERFs and conservatives. It really just feels like a ploy to associate our ideology with things that aren’t ‘leftist’, so we are seen as puritanical and discredited in the eyes of society.
This is especially prominent in the LGBT community. Kink, porn, etc are sold as things that are inseparable from a queer identity — kink is something that is expected in the LGBT community. I rarely partake in even subreddits regarding my own communities anymore because they wind up flooded with memes about porn and kink and everything else that’s contrary to my ideology. The vast majority of other anti porn radical feminists I’ve seen are other lesbians (both trans and cis women) but even we seem to be a fringe group in the community considering that in all the large lesbian subreddits they preach pro-porn ideology like the gospel. I see posts about kink being intertwined with pride and it upsets me so deeply because in our quest for acceptance other queer people have resorted to finding acceptance anywhere, even in dangerous places.
I just find it so depressing that so many other people feel that their identity is intertwined with unhealthy or dangerous practices, and that they have to advocate for them even though they’re so blatantly misogynistic for fear of being excluded from the community. Sorry this is kind of incoherent, I was just scrolling through another LGBT sub and it reminded me of the issues we face even in other leftist communities because of how widely accepted misogyny is.

Intactos, sometimes also called Pure Dolphins or Dolphin Puritans, were members of the early 22nd century Bioconservative, Morphic Puritan and Anti-Transhumanist Intacto movement that opposed cybernetic and even genetic manipulation of the Dolphin body and opposed Morphic rights of the Dolphins as a result. The movement also had more political and sovereignist ideas with many of their policies opposing the ever-tightening relationship between Humans and Hooped Nations as well as Dolphin Communities economic dependencies on their local Human counterparts and coastal cities.
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Intacto Movement started within the Popist Catholic Dominican Papacy's Miami Hooped Nation branch as its bioconservative policy of Morphic Purism that opposed any sort of transformation or as they like to call it distortion of the Sophont bodily form when a more radical and Dolphin Supremacist subgroup of the Church's Miami Hooped Nation branch split to form the Unbroken Dolphins ( Spanish : Delfines Intactos ) which is where the movement got its name from, later on the Intacto Movement spread into the other Hooped Nations as well with it being especially popular in Miami, Amazon River, Fuegia and Lessepsia Hooped Nations with it even resulting in the Amazon River National divorce of 2121 that resulted in the creation of North Amazon ( Bioconservative Intacto ) and South Amazon ( Cyberprogressive Homosophile ) Hooped Nations.
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Intacto Movement has been classified by some countries, most prominently Germany and the Eurosphere Countries ,as a extremist organization due to its natural and organic connection with various Furred Reichist, Uplift Supremacist and Radical Furred Rights groups such as the Burned Furs of Liberation ( BRF )

Greg Johnson
For my purposes, I will define a religion as the communal practice of honoring the holy. By the holy, I do not necessarily mean a God or gods or any supernatural beings, whether immanent or transcendent. What I mean is the highest good in any belief system, that to which all lower values must defer and, in a conflict, be sacrificed.
One can either duly honor the highest value, or one can ignore, denigrate, and profane it. Religion honors it. But it is not enough merely to honor the highest good in thought. One must do so in action. But even that is not yet religion. To actively honor the highest good individually is to lead a righteous life. To honor the highest good collectively, in community with others, that is religion. Such collective honors to the highest good are rituals.
Religion, on this view, is inherently communal and inherently ritualistic. But it is not inherently theistic or supernatural. A community could hold itself—its origins, its existence, and its destiny—to be the highest good and make itself the object of a civil religion, of communal rituals of self-remembrance and self-perpetuation: honoring heroes and ancestors, sanctifying marriage and family life, sacralizing education and coming-of-age, solemnly commemorating great historical events, demonizing enemies, damning traitors, and so forth.
I believe that there is one highest good for any community that persists over time. For religion—a common hierarchy of values combined with a means for collectively honoring and perpetuating them—is the primary preserver of unity. A community with multiple highest goods and religions may appear in a historical freeze frame, but I would argue that if you let the film run, you will see that such a society is actually in the process of decomposition. There are many values and forces that pull societies apart. A society will perish, therefore, if its continued unity is not valued, and if that value is not made into an actual cohesive force by being given collective honor through a civil religion. Mere external, legal force is not enough if its goals are not seen as legitimate in the minds of the people.
What makes a community one need not have anything to do with religion. A community can emerge simply because of geographical isolation and shared blood, language, and customs. But what sustains a community as one over time has everything to do with religion. There are, of course, deep-seated, entirely natural inclinations to love one’s own and to distrust strangers. But these alone are not enough to preserve distinct communities.
Communities can perish by splitting apart and by merging with others. Sometimes communities with common values split because they fall into quarreling due to scarcity. Sometimes radically different communities and races merge and blend with one other, due to greed and lust. For communities to stick together, they have to make unity a higher value than family and factional loyalties and individual greed, lust, and ambition. Making such priorities stick is a matter of religion.
Of course, the unity of a community may still be threatened if there are still higher values above it, for instance universal brotherhood, or capitalist wealth accumulation, or Communist wealth redistribution. Thus the best way to preserve a community is to make it the highest value, i.e., to erect a civil religion.
If a common religion preserves the unity of a society, whence the religious pluralism of modern Western societies? There are essentially two explanations. First, the pluralism could be illusory. Second, the unity could be illusory or transitory. Both are true of the West.
Western religious pluralism is in part illusory. It is a mistake to identify the plurality of Christian sects with genuine religious pluralism, for since the 17th-century, Christianity has not been the dominant religion of the West. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War between Protestants and Catholics. In 1660, the Restoration ended Puritan rule in England. Both events in fact replaced Christianity as the dominant religion of the West with a new civil religion of Liberal Universalism. In effect, the values of religious tolerance, social peace, and secular progress were raised above Christianity, and ever since, Christianity has submitted—sometimes eagerly, sometimes grudgingly, but submitted—to this new civil religion.
Second, Western unity is in part illusory, because Liberal Universalism has opened Europe to subversion and colonization by peoples who pay lip service to Liberal Universalism even as they practice tribal forms of particularism (most prominently, Jews, but also East and South Asians and other Third World immigrants) or rival, illiberal forms of universalism (Islam, Marxism). Liberal Universalist society, because it does not insist on genuine reciprocity from others, is a self-subverting system that will be dismembered by the aliens it has allowed in its midst.
White Nationalism, as I conceive of it, is not just a political philosophy, competing with other political philosophies for power under Liberal Universalist hegemony. Rather, we must aim at displacing Liberal Universalism and establishing a White Nationalist hegemony, a new civil religion for the West which treats the preservation and flourishing of our race as the highest good, to which all lesser values must be subordinated. White Nationalism must make the highest good of our race the center of a public cult celebrating our identity, our heritage, our heroes, and our Faustian destiny.
From this point of view, the debates about Christianity versus Paganism in White Nationalist circles seem beside the point.
The critics of Christianity are right: Christian values are at best indifferent to racial preservation and at root hostile to it. Beyond that, Christianity is not really an alternative to Liberal Universalism, which has simply secularized Christian values and eschatological fantasies.
But the critics of Christianity are wrong to think that Christianity is, today, the primary enemy. For the real religion of our time is Liberal Universalism, to which even the Pope bends his knee.
Besides, most of the people who counsel a return to Christendom actually picture just an earlier, less overtly decadent period in the history of Western Liberal Universalism. If they actually knew anything about the real history of Christendom—if they read a history of the Albigensian Crusade, the Thirty Years’ War, or the English Civil War, for instance—most of them would reject a real Christian restoration in horror.
I have no doubt that the indigenous European folk religions can be revivified through studying the fragments that have come down to us, accessing traces of living traditions, and having direct experiences of the numinous. I have no doubt that European folk religions are more consistent with European identity politics than Christianity, Islam, Liberal Universalism, etc.
But I see no sign that neo-pagans seriously wish to establish a pagan civil religion. Most neo-pagans seem entirely content with being socially marginal, “tolerated” outsiders in what they imagine is a Christian society.
Moreover, when politics comes up, neo-pagans basically divide themselves into two camps: Liberal Universalists and White Nationalists. And let us be frank: the vast majority are Liberal Universalists and White Nationalists first, and neo-pagans second.
For White Nationalists, the real religious struggle of our time should not be between Christians and pagans. Christianity does not rule, and neo-pagans don’t even know what that would entail. The real struggle is between Liberal Universalism and White Nationalism.
So what would the religious landscape look like under White Nationalist hegemony?
First of all, under Liberal Universalist hegemony there is complete unity on Liberal Universalist values. Likewise, under White Nationalism, there would be complete unity on the supreme importance of white racial preservation and progress. The denigration or destruction of our race would lie outside the parameters of acceptable opinion, just as White Nationalism is currently outside the boundaries of polite society. All rival civil religions and hegemonies would be suppressed: Liberalism, Marxism, Islam, Judaism, etc.
Second, just as under Liberal Universalist hegemony, there would be complete pluralism and tolerance in all unimportant matters. As long as Christian denominations do not challenge the racial civil religion, they will enjoy the same status as they do today under Liberal Universalism. The same goes for all forms of neo-paganism, imports from the Far East, and any other religion you care to make up.
Since Christianity’s kingdom is not of this world, and since the church has a long history of supple accommodation to whatever Caesar is in power, Christianity will quickly reconcile itself with racial civil religion.
Many of the values of Liberal Universalism—private enterprise, private life, freedom of thought, speech, and creativity, etc.—can also be preserved under a White Nationalist hegemony insofar as they are consistent with racial survival and health.
Under a White Nationalist hegemony, it would be understood that the Racial Civil Religion would not fully satisfy the spiritual needs of everyone. But, as in Antiquity, everyone would be free to explore mystery cults and foreign faiths as long as they do not undermine our race. But for me, my race is not just my nation, it is my religion as well.
Article

I have never been good with my hands. I took after my father in that respect. I was that kid who could never hold a nail steady, who was never able to catch a ball in little league (or hit a ball with a bat for that matter), who could never figure out how to fix my bike when the chain came loose. This physical ineptitude continued into my adulthood and remains as true as ever as I now write these words at the age of 41. When something breaks down in my house or car, almost no matter how simple, I call someone to fix it. I’m the antithesis to a DYIer. I can change a lightbulb, if necessary (as long as there’s nothing unusual about the fixture and it’s not too high for me to reach standing on a chair), or tighten the screws on a loose door knob, but that’s about the extent of it. Even when I fill up my car with gas, I go to a full service pump, if possible; I don’t like the smell of gasoline on my hands.
It is, therefore, highly ironic that earlier today I found myself replacing a toilet fill valve for the second time this weekend. This morning I was under a woman’s kitchen sink, installing her new garbage disposal (and struggling mightily). As she watched me work, I kept pulling up my jeans. Not only didn’t I want her to see my plumber’s crack when I bent over, I especially didn’t want her to see the bright yellow, nylon thong panties I was wearing. This was not my choice of undergarments. Rather, it was the choice of Luke, my wife’s ex husband and current lover. He could be described other ways as well: my boss, my tormentor, my master, my king…
My name is Walter Rollins and I am not a plumber. I am a tenured Professor of English Literature at a well respected liberal arts college in rural Ohio. In fact, because I have Master’s degree in History in addition to a PhD in English, I am one of the few professors at my college to sit on the faculty of two departments. Nevertheless, for the last year or so, I’ve been filling the role of plumber’s helper in Luke’s thriving plumbing business. Luke is 29, a year younger than my lovely wife, Brooke.
I lecture and have published extensively on the subjects of chivalry, honor and shame in medieval literature and history. My best known work (the one that got me tenure), published by one of the top university presses in the world, focuses on the prominent role that shaming and humiliation rituals have played in medieval literature – for disgraced knights, cuckolded earls, fallen ladies, traitorous lords, defeated princes, etc. Shame has always been a subject that has fascinated me. I’m sure that has something to do with the fact that I am a sexual masochist. What’s less clear is whether my masochism is responsible for my fascination with the subject of shame in literature and history? Or, did all of the stories and historical accounts I’ve read about shame and ritual humiliation turn me into a masochist? It’s a chicken and egg question. I don’t really have a definitive answer, but I suspect that it’s probably more the former than the latter.
I remember how even is a little kid, looking through an old American history book in my parents’ house, I was mesmerized by a drawing I saw of two shirtless men tied to the back of a wagon who were being whipped on their backs as they were paraded through the town square. I actually found this image the other day on the Internet. It’s easy to Google: Whipping Quakers in Streets of Boston. You can see the hint of a sadistic smile on the Puritan who is wielding the whip. Other Puritans stand by smiling at the suffering of the Quakers. In the foreground, off to the left, is a Puritan mother with her young daughter and slightly older son. Although the mother attempts to shield her daughter from the scene, the girl looks on with rapt attention; the boy, meanwhile, stares at the flogged men with delight — a budding little sadist. Even the family dog seems to be excited by the scene.
I first met Brooke roughly nine years ago when she was a senior enrolled in my seminar course, Chivalry and Courtly Love in Medieval Literature. I had seen many beautiful coeds cycle through my courses over the years, but with her slim build, long legs, perky breasts, wavy, long brown hair and dimpled smile, Brooke was exactly my type and stood out from the rest. She was a solid B+ student in my class (I’m a tough grader), and seemed to have a genuine interest in the subject matter. There were only about ten students in the class, roughly evenly split between male and female.
Brooke usually sat in the front row. In the late spring months, she favored short dresses or shorts. One afternoon, while reading the class some examples of chivalric poetry, my eyes caught sight of her dangling her flip flop off her lovely foot. It was all I could do to keep my eyes on the poem (fortunately, I knew it well); they kept involuntarily wandering back to her lovely arches and pretty polished toes (a light red shade). I could swear she caught me staring at her feet a couple of times; we made momentary eye contact and I thought I detected a faint, sexy smirk on her lips. She could not know how I longed to go down on my knees, gently remove her flip flop, kiss her toes and pledge my undying fealty to her. Could she?
I would have gladly done so in front of the entire class, but for the fact I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize my cushy, tenure-track position. Like most professors, I wasn’t paid well, but I was certainly comfortable. I was respected by my peers, generally liked by my students and had it pretty good overall. Thirty two years old at the time, I had only had two previous sexual relationships in my life, but had been dumped by both women. Not surprisingly, then, I was incredibly underconfident and shy around women.
My sex life at the time, sadly, essentially consisted of masturbating to my submissive, sexual fantasies. I didn’t see Brooke for another six years after she left my class at the end of that semester, but I would be less than truthful if I didn’t admit that she (and her beautiful feet) played a central role in my fantasy life during those intervening years.
And then six years later, I met her again when she was my server at a nice restaurant two towns over. That’s when I entered what I think of as my golden age. It was not long lived, but was no less golden for its brevity.

Of course, we know that Christmas annually provokes an orgy of materialism. Most of the customs for celebrating Christmas are from ancient paganism. Jesus was not born on December 25. There is no Santa Claus. And the tooth fairy doesn’t exist either. We all know this. Interestingly enough, much of the world out there knows all this too. But many sincere traditional Christians say it doesn’t matter if Christmas comes from paganism.
However, because pagan symbols have an enduring meaning, Christians shouldn’t observe Christmas, despite we may have positive, sentimental memories from keeping this holiday in the past. There are three points to keep in mind about why Christians should avoid celebrating Christmas.

1. We can’t arbitrarily erase the pagan historical meanings of the customs used to celebrate Christmas.

Some traditional Christians reason that we can just decree that the pagan meanings tied to the evergreen tree, the mistletoe, the holly, the poinsettia, etc., don’t exist. After all, God made these plants on the third day of creation. They didn’t have pagan meanings when He made them, right? At a wave of our hands, we reclaim these for God, and their heathenism disappears. But how well did that kind of procedure work for Aaron at Mt. Sinai? Notice Exodus 32:4-9, especially verse 5 (NKJV):
“And he [Aaron} received the gold from their hand, and he fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made a molded calf. Then they said, "This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!" So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, "Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD."Then they rose early on the next day, offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. And the LORD said to Moses, "Go, get down! For your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves. "They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. They have made themselves a molded calf, and worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, 'This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!'" And the LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and indeed it is a stiff-necked people!”
In short, Aaron’s arbitrary decree didn’t erase the pagan meaning of the golden calf, who was really the Egyptian god Apis. God not only didn’t accept Israel’s worship directed at this calf, He angrily rejected it. Rebadging and relabeling the worship of this idol as the worship of Jehovah, the Eternal, failed completely. After all, God made the cow on the 6th day of creation also, didn’t He? It didn’t have a pagan meaning then either, right? To re-label the pagan customs doesn’t sanitize them. God has a memory. So people can’t arbitrarily take rituals used to worship other gods and then decree henceforth that they are for the true god starting now. Consider this analogy. Suppose a husband kept a lot of pictures of his ex-girlfriends around the house. Suppose he admires them frequently. Suppose he ordered custom framed pictures of them and hung them prominently on the walls. If he claimed, "I think of you when I look at them," that wouldn't be persuasive to his wife, for good reason. These photos have enduring meanings. So do pagan customs.
Let’s give a historical political analogy of how the meanings of symbols can’t be arbitrarily reassigned. Right now, mentally bring up a picture of a swastika in your own mind, such as from an old movie or TV show about Nazi Germany. Now pretend someone claims this symbol now represents enduring peace, international brotherhood, and racial harmony. Presumably, you would say that’s crazy. Intuitively, you would feel that symbols have enduring meanings that can’t be erased. Yet, before World War II, some Indians had traditionally used this symbol in America. Sometimes the Campfire Girls even used it on Indian costumes that their young members wore. But it’s completely hopeless at this point to reverse and erase the meaning assigned to the swastika by the actions of Hitler’s regime. The swastika is a symbol of racism, war, and oppression; it can’t be changed. The same goes for the customs long used to celebrate Christmas.

1. Christmas and Easter are alternative celebrations designed to divert the pagans from being pagan.

The traditional Christian church, when it invented Christmas in the fourth century, aimed to divert the heathen from celebrating the Saturnalia and the Brumalia in Rome, which were celebrated by all sorts of drunken, sexualized parties, societal role reversals, with slaves acting like masters, gift exchanges, and public street demonstrations. Both Augustus and Claudius tried to shorten it (to 3 days and to 5 days), but backed down when facing massive resistance by the masses. It’s no wonder that the Catholic church tried to co-opt the day rather than attack it head-on after the time of Constantine and the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.) The church accepted and tolerated in its own traditions these pagan customs. There’s no serious historical evidence the Catholic Church tried to stop this from happening in many areas of practice and doctrine. They even picked the day (December 25) that the rival god Sol Invictus was celebrated on to be Christ’s birthday. But that date was a historical falsehood, even a lie. After all, if we are going to go by what the bible itself teaches, the date of Jesus' birth couldn't have been in winter because the shepherds wouldn't have been in the fields then nor would have the Romans conducted a census at that time of the year either. Most likely Jesus was born in the autumn, perhaps on the Feast of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah) or during the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), since those holy days celebrate His return and its effects in advance; for his birth to occur during those holy days would constitute a foreshadowing of what is to come more fully the second time around, as per the prophetic principle of duality. So why was this date chosen, other than because of the influence of pagan celebrations at the same time of the year?
The rowdy customs used to celebrate the Saturnalia, similar to those of Carnival in the springtime, were carried over into Christmas's celebration. For this reason the Puritans of England under Cromwell and in Massachusetts banned the celebration of the holiday in the 17thcentury. Although Western culture since the 19th century has worked to paste a better image over the holiday, such as due to the broad influence of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" to make it more family oriented, the rowdy side never has gone away. As a store clerk in a liquor store in East Lansing, Michigan many years ago, I was amazed by how many people wanted to buy alcohol on Christmas Eve when the state was legally "dry" for sales from 6 PM Christmas Eve to 7 AM on December 26. The drunken side of this holiday has been pushed from public view, but it's still there, done under the protective cover (and distraction) of the family-oriented celebrations around Christmas trees.

1. God said not to use pagan customs to worship Him.

Here’s the key text to consider (Deut. 12:29-32): NIV: “But when you have driven them out and settled in their land, and after they have been destroyed before you, be careful not to be ensnared by inquiring about their gods, saying, "How do these nations serve their gods? We will do the same." You must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods. See that you do all I command you; do not add to it or take away from it.” Verse 2 makes the same key point: “You must not worship the Lord your God in their [the pagans’] way.” We need to worship God in spirit and truth; sincerity of motive wasn’t good enough, as Jesus told the Samaritan woman (John 4:22, 24, NASB): “You worship that which you do not know; we worship that which we know, for salvation is from the Jews. . . . God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” Similarly, there’s the first point made in Jeremiah 10:2-4, NKJV): “Thus says the LORD: "Do not learn the way of the Gentiles. . . . For the customs of the peoples are futile; For one cuts a tree from the forest, The work of the hands of the workman, with the ax. They decorate it with silver and gold; They fasten it with nails and hammers So that it will not topple.” This description of the making of an idol is remarkably similar to the making of a modern Christmas tree.
We shouldn’t transfer over rituals and symbols used for worshiping other gods to worship Jehovah. Notice what Paul said in II Cor. 6:14-18, which isn’t merely about not marrying someone outside the faith (NKJV): “(2 Corinthians 6:14-16) Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said: "I will dwell in them And walk among them. I will be their God, And they shall be My people."
This text applies in principle to many other areas of life besides to marriage, such as to partnerships in business. We shouldn’t mix the worship of the true God with the worship of false gods. Christians should leave behind the customs of the world when worshipping the Eternal, even when we have pleasant, sentimental memories of having celebrated its pagan-derived holidays.
Consider the origin of such customs as bonfires and lights on Christmas trees. The pagans worried about the sun becoming weaker and weaker in winter as the winter solstice approached. They wanted to be certain that the source of life, the sun, was still around when winter ended. This was a case of sympathetic magic: People do a ritual hoping that it represents a future reality. For example, if you draw pictures of successful animal hunts on the cave wall, you’ll have success in killing that deer or lion that you run into tomorrow. So they lit fires in order to help the sun come back.
Think of the meaning read into the holly, mistletoe, and evergreen trees. They stay green all year around and defy the birth, life, rebirth cycle of nature and the seasons. (Here the interpretation of Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” is the key reference work, even if it has its set of problems as well). The mistletoe is a parasitic plant that grows on oak trees.

1. Since God is holy, pure, and undefiled, true Christians shouldn’t use unholy, impure, and defiled customs of worship.

Since God wants true Christians to become like Himself, He doesn’t want His followers adopting customs that make them less like Himself. To mix pagan customs with the worship of the true God defiles one’s worship of God completely. It’s like drinking arsenic mixed into good glass of water: The good part of the drink won’t prevent you from being poisoned.
Historically, what else was being celebrated around the time of the winter solstice in the ancient world? The Saturnalia. In Rome, December 17-23, this celebration included group orgies, drunkenness, legalized gambling, societal role reversals, like slaves acting like masters, and exchanging gifts. Both Augustus and Claudius tried to shorten it (to three days and to five days), but they backed down when facing massive revolts by the masses. It’s no wonder that the Catholic Church tried to co-opt this holiday rather than attack it head-on after the time of Constantine and the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.) that gave toleration to the Christian Church.
Then we have the Brumalia, which is another pagan celebration, which began on November 24 and lasted a month until the Saturnalia and the “waxing of light” (i.e., when the days start to grow longer again). This festival honored the god of wine, Bacchus, which befitted a holiday celebrated with rowdy drinking parties at night. “Bruma” means “shortest day” in Latin.
And what occurred on December 25? It was the date of the (re)birth of the sun, “Sol Invictus.” The Roman Emperor Aurelian (reigned 270-275) proclaimed a new Roman holiday called “Dies Natalis Solis Invicti” after a series of successful military victories that restored much of the empire. He has been called “the Father of Christmas” as a result. He was aiming to subordinate all the religions of the Roman Empire to his new cult dedicated to “unconquerable sun” god. Ironically, the celebration of the sun’s rebirth eventually became the celebration of the Son’s birth. The earliest mention of December 25 as the date for Jesus’ birth appears in a Roman Almanac dated to 336 A.D.
Modern Christmas celebrations mix the Roman traditions with the northern Germanic customs. Santa Claus is really based on the Nordic god Woden’s riding a horse with eight legs. He lived in the far north, in Valhalla, and had a big white beard. He would fly through the sky during the winter solstice period (Dec. 21-25). He rewarded good children and punished bad ones. Likewise stories about the god Thor resembled Santa Claus in many ways. He also had a long white beard, lived in the far north, and liked to enter homes through chimneys since fire was sacred to him. He was portrayed as an old man with a jovial, friendly deposition. Unlike the other Teutonic gods who rode horses, he drove a chariot drawn by two goats, Cracker and Gnasher. The pagan Norse of Europe were deathly afraid of Oden, who was said to cross the sky and determine who would live prosperously or die So the tales about Santa Claus really go back to these pagan gods, for which Wednesday and Thursday were named. Should adults lie to their children so they believe in a fictional character who’s based ultimately on stories about two pagan Germanic gods? Snorri Sturluson (1179 to 1241) of Iceland wrote "Edda." It’s the most important primary source of the myths of the Norse/Teutonic legends and myths. Despite being a Christian, he retold the old pagan stories with skill and some level of sympathy. We can claim, at this late date, that he was making up the names, but as one examines how he writes his book, he's the one reporting to us what he was told and had learned as well. In "Edda," p. 22, he writes: "Thor has two goats whose names are Tanngnlost and Tanngrisnir, and a chariot that he drives in, and the goats draw the chariot. From this he is known as "Oku-Thor." It can't be seen as coincidence that his stories are set in the far north and feature elves and dwarfs.
Many children get upset when they find out that they have been lied to by adults concerning Santa Claus and who brought them their gifts. Shouldn’t that indicate to us that there is something rotten at the heart of the pagan customs used to celebrate (supposedly) Christ’s birth? This supposed “white lie” really has generated some trouble over the years.
So true Christians shouldn’t celebrate Christmas. We shouldn’t let emotional arguments about its being for the children and/or family gatherings to deceive us. First, God doesn’t want pagan customs to be used to worship him. Second, Relabeling pagan customs doesn’t make them acceptable to God. Third, God wants His saints to be holy, pure, and undefiled by pagan rituals. Christians can’t put Christ back into Christmas because He wasn’t the original reason for the season. Christians shouldn’t think that the meanings of the pagan customs historically tied to Christmas can be arbitrarily erased. We shouldn’t celebrate Christmas because, as Jeremiah said (10:2), “Do not learn the way of the Gentiles.” Since God has a memory, Christians should too.
But now, let's perform a pivot here. Why are Protestants, who officially uphold sola scriptura as a principle of doctrinal authority, so insistent on celebrating holidays not found in the bible (Christmas and Easter) while condemning the celebration of the days actually found and commanded in the bible? Jesus and His disciples observed the Passover, Pentecost, the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Tabernacles, etc., as they are listed in Leviticus 23. From the viewpoint of marking crucial milestones in God's plan of redemption, they remain important and meaningful, whether they are memorials of past events (Jesus' death and the birthday of the church) or shadows/types of future events (Christ's return and the prosperity and peace of His millennial rule).
The Quartodecimian controversy of the second century, in which Christians under the leadership of Polycarp and later Polycrates in the second century argued for the observation of Passover instead of Easter, shows that at least one of these days were still being kept by Christians long after the death of the original apostles.
Fundamentally, the burden of proof is on those who preach the abolition of the Sabbath and the holy days of Leviticus 23, since silence doesn't abolish anything by itself. We have the Old Testament, which commands the Sabbath; it's not necessary to find that commandment repeated in Paul's letters in order to know that it is still in force. The other side has to prove that it is gone instead by using clear texts, not overly broad assumptions about how to interpret the bible based on dispensationalism.
Furthermore, most arguments used against the observance of these days also refute the observance of the other moral laws of the Old Testament, such as the other nine of the Ten Commandments, so they have to be rejected. For example: "It's going back to Moses to keep the Sabbath." "Well, is it "going back to Moses" to avoid adultery?"

John Calvin was known for his emphasis on sovereign election of individuals not dependent on man’s failure or weakness, and I believe he should have applied that principle above all to God’s election of the nation Israel.
Immediately upon Calvin’s death, his successor Theodore Beza, rejected his stance towards Israel. “There will be a time in which they also (as the prophets have foretold) will effectually embrace that which they now so stubbornly for the most part reject and refuse.” -Theodore Beza
Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr believed the same, and as early as 1560, four years before Calvin’s death, the commentary written in the Geneva Bible study notes by the English and Scot Protestant leaders taught that the whole nation of Jews would come to faith in Christ in the commentary under Romans 11.
By the seventeenth century, belief in a future conversion of the Jews became the mainstream belief among the English Puritans. So also the Dutch reformed theologians of the seventeenth century believed almost to a man that Israel “according to the flesh“ would experience a future conversion.
“Nothing is more certainly foretold than this national conversion of the Jews in the eleventh chapter of Romans. And there are also many passages of the Old Testament that cannot be interpreted in any other sense.” - Jonathan Edwards
Charles Spurgeon also forcefully taught that to deny Israel becoming a nation again would be to explain away the plain meaning of the text. Commenting on Ezekiel 37: “If words mean anything, first, that there shall be a political restoration of the Jews to their own land..that there shall be a spiritual restoration, a conversion in fact, of the tribes of Israel… there will be a native government again, there will again be the form of a body politic; a state shall be incorporated, and a king shall reign.”
John Owen held the same position: “The nation of the Jews, all the world over, shall be called effectually brought unto the knowledge of the messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ, with which merely they shall also receive deliverance from their captivity, and restoration unto their own land, with a blessed, flourishing condition therein.”
“Though we don’t know the time in which this conversion of the nation of Israel will come to pass, yet this much we may determine from scripture, that it will be before the glory of the Gentile part of the church shall be fully accomplished, because it is said that their coming in shall be life from the dead to the Gentiles (Rom. 11:12, 15). For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” -Jonathan Edwards
This position is also held by J.C. Ryle, Charles Hodge, John Murray, Thomas Draxe, Matthew Henry, William Perkins, Matthew Poole, Thomas Brightman, John Newton, Henry Finch, Cotton Mather, Joseph Mede, Increase Mather, Geerhardus Vos, Thomas Boston, John Gill, and many, many others.
Martin Lloyd Jones saw profound significance in the modern developments taking place in Israel- “To me 1967, the year that the Jews occupied all of Jerusalem, was very crucial. Luke 21:43 is one of the most significant prophetic verses: ‘Jerusalem, it reads, ‘shall be trodden down of the Gentiles UNTIL the time of the Gentiles be fulfilled.’ It seems to me that took place in 1967- something crucially important that had not occurred in 2,000 years.
Has the fullness of the Gentiles come in, and is this era coming to a close? Apart from a small number of Muslim and Communist countries, evangelical churches exist in every part of the world. Saint Augustine said: “Because their blindness has profited us, therefore hath the elder brother been supplanted by the younger, and the younger is called the supplanter. But how long shall this be? The time will come, the end of the world will come, and all Israel will believe; not they who now are, but their children who shall then be.“
There has been diversity in reformed interpretations of Israel. But there is room in the tradition for seeing a future for Jewish Israel and its land. This view goes back to the beginning and was held by some of the most prominent and earliest church fathers: Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, John Chrysostom, Prosper of Aquitaine, Ambrose of Milan, Cassiodorus, Theodoret of Cyrus, Cyril of Alexandria, Ambrioaster, St. Jerome, Thomas Aquinas, Gregory, Isidore, Bede, Peter Damian, Anselm, and Bernard.

After a "brief" holiday hiatus, we have another chapter, another entry into my first-timer's close reading of Malazan: Book of the Fallen!

Chapter 6

A chapter of sane human length. A long, continuous sequence following the caravanasi and some new companions. That said, it's full with all manner of weird and confounding unpleasantries. Ah Malazan, you never do change, do you? On top of this, we get some more revelations, including one I expect you all have been anticipating my reaction to for quite a while. And by that I of course mean Hetan's oil-slicked cultural exchange. Seriously though, you do get a bit more of my puritanical reflex in this write-up, and that might have too negatively colored my perception of our inter-personal drama here.

Epigraph

An excerpt from Kulburat's Vision by Horal Thume (b. 1134). A return of the one line format: "Where they tread, blood follows..." As stated before, my standing policy on dating in the Malazverse is that Erikson's general ambivalence to the timeline makes any use of dates interesting in and of themselves. Here, we have someone alive in the present day, meaning that whoever "they" are, is a force that exists contemporaneously. The K'Chain Che'Malle? Our necromancer bros? Gods/Elder Gods? The latter would line up with previous sentiments of the series, and would also align with what I beleive to be a soft revelation this chapter, but it would also be redundant not only in content but as an epigraph.
It may also be a deliberate ambiguity to denote the many lethal forces in this chapter, but who knows?

Saltoan

We return to the caravanasi, as they approach Saltoan. A brief check of the map suggests we are now halfway between Darujhistan and the fated city of Capustan. We get a rich description of the dirrepair of the city and its attendant causeway, rendered less relevant by by the changing course of the River Catalin. After some interesting history is recounted, showing how fragile even the surest of successes are when reliant on nature's course. Conversely, it shows just how difficult it is to truly kill a community with deep roots, considering Saltoan and the other river settlements have endured for four hundred years since the decline.
Gruntle leads the way toward's the city's Sunset gate, Harllo driving the carriage along the causeway and Stonny beside him. The woman complains over their master's not heeding their advice to head straight through to Sunrise gate*, and Gruntle largely ignores her rabble. He regards what little remains of the city guard, drained as it was assisting the war efforts against the Malazans, before they pass into the city streets. On my initial read of the scene, I'd missed the fact that we were already in Saltoan, as the description of the wedge-tight paths, dirty and scrap littered ground, and frequent banditry made this seem to be a lost a shortcut through some tight valley. That said a lot of the small details make much more sense this way. This city is in horrendous shape.
*Referring to the western and eastern gates as Sunset and Sunrise respectively is rather clever worldbuilding and smacks of historical inspiration from somewhere.
Gruntle recalls a time when he had to fight his way clear through the city from bandits informing his haste to be through Saltoan swiftly. Even now they are watched by eager eyes, awaiting a wreck or other opening. They pass through a place known as Wu's Closet Square, a place where an Inn once stood and had unaccountably acquired the name of "Wu's Closet." I was and am bemused by the anecdote, as we see here a canon instance of what I am told is the fannon name for the planet. What's more is how random the reference is, it's not like this is even a cool worldbuilding thing like the sorcerer nightmare tower in Darujhistan, it's just a burnt out pit where an inn was well before our PoV character was born. The whole episode screams of deliberation but I don't have anything to take away from it.
They are followed by a gaggle of solemn street urchins as they make their way deeper into the cobbled streets, until Stonny notes that the children have vanished. Sensing trouble, Gruntle loudly checks that Harllo is armed with a crossbow. Ahead, the anticipated figures emerge; Gruntle is mildly surprised to recognize the leading woman as Nektara, one of the local gang leaders, somewhat out of her way in this part of the city. Nektara, for her part, recognizes Gruntle and Stonny. Boy does she recognize Stonny. Gruntle learns from the woman as well as Keruli that they are to be escorted to meet with this city's rulers. It's true rulers of the underground.
It seems that the hold-masters and mistresses need assistance of some sort, which Keruli believes that he is best equipped to provide. Gruntle once again wonders at his employer, warning the man that he and the other guards will not share in his faith in these criminals.
We open the next scene with some more expositing on Saltoan's two hearts, of different blood yet both corrupt. I'd imagine this to just be a fanciful description of the legitimate and illegitimate governments, as we do not get a follow-up on the metaphor here. The group is in a dim room, filled with smoke and the smell of cheap spirits, most of the powerful hold-masters are present; Nektara in particular, with her hookah and Stonny, is doing her best femme Jabba the Hutt act.
Karuli holds the center of the room, dressed, Gruntle notes, like one of the oldest statues to be found in Darujhistan. He opens his speech implicitly admitting to being a part of some priestly chaste or another. As such, he is grateful for Saltoan's rulership letting him into their circle, as they are tired and threatened by the Pannion Seer's prosthelytizers and propagandists. These people speak of impartial laws and prosperous rulership, which entices the weary and oppressed citizenry of Saltoan and her sister cities.
This appraisal is agreed upon by the crimelords and ladies present, and Gruntle notes, ah, Nektara's personal distraction for the evening. Keruli pays the obvious disruption no mind and continues, noting this depiction to be a farce. Certainly there is a great equality among citizens but the non-citizens are less than subjects. These Tenescowri are the Pannion Domin's peasant army, only permitted the freedom to raze alien territories and alleviate their own sufferings through the most horrific cruelties. Cannibalism, rape, torture. So... I have a theory of sorts that everyone has not only rational and irrational fears but also what I call medium-rational fears. Things which are themselves scary but the person has an outsized aversion to them relative to how prominent that thing is likely to be in their life. For myself, these are cannibalism and body horror. And while I am darkly fascinated by body horror, cannibalism just wrecks me as a concept. So while all this talk of Children of the Dead Seed stuff is horrifying and incomprehensibly dark, the idea of a massive sea of cannibalistic and effectively feral peasants messes with me in a way disproportional to the appalling revelation that I suspect is meant to be the hook of the scene here.
But yea, necro-rape babies. I suspect there to be some sorcerous origin to both the conception* and implementation of the practice on the scale it evidently occurs at. Additionally, while I'm liable to believe Keruli's veracity for reasons we'll get into later, all of this feels like libel of one sort or another. This is like one of those existential religious wars but one side actually practices all the messed up stuff that the other side accuses them of. "The Pannions? Yea, they abuse their own people and have a dirty, ignorant hoard of Tenescowri who roam the countryside and murder and rape and eat people. In varying orders."
*gags
But this is Keruli's advised tactic against the Pannion priests, to lay bare the horrors that the people of Saltoan would open themselves up to, and to have these people themselves drive the enemy out. At this juncture, Grunle spaces out and regards his employer. He now suspects him to be a priest, but the only new temple in Darujhistan is the one sanctified to Treach, but that doesn't fit. He returns to the conversation as the discussion has turned to a series of gristly killings in the last few days. Gruntle suspects that this was the work of Bauchaelin and Korbal Broach.
Later, Stonny Menackis, the woman who was just publicly jacked off in front of dozens, complains about boredom regarding the meeting. She does, however, express appreciation regarding Nektara's intervention. I can't help but wonder at the power dynamics involved; while Stonny was nominally concenting, I wonder whether or not that would have mattered. I don't have a great read on the situation, but I suspect that that last bit might weigh on the mind of Miss Menackis more than she lets on. But she and Harllo banter at one another through the gutter, as Keruli and Gruntle handle the actual business at hand.
Karuli believes that things have gone favorably here tonight, but this stop off is incidental compared to his true business is Capustan. While Gruntle wonders, yet again, at this true business, he opts to allow his employer to keep his secrets for tonight.

Curious Meetings

Heading out from Saltoan before dawn, Gruntle is relived as they make their way beyond the range of the cities bandit parties. It would seem that Keruli's assurance of protection proved true, and they make great time in the far safer Capu territory. Further ahead, however, they find the remains of an ambush, one where a large, preternaturally swift wagon passed by, and the expertly coordinated and well armed highwaymen were slain with no wounds. Gruntle draws the obvious conclusion of Bauchaelin and Korbal Broach, noting that this attack as they left town coincided with the end-date of the killings in Saltoan; they move on.
They travel a few more hours when Stonny, having ridden ahead to see what the situation at the waystation up ahead is, returns to report that there are three Barghast staying there. What's more, she announces that Capustan is but days away from a siege, suggesting they not have a hoard of Pannion forces between them and the open road. Keruli asks what clan the Barghast were from (Whiteface) and suggests they travel with them. He also has information which suggests that they have plenty of time before the siege, given the Septarch leading the army. Once dropped off, Keruli will consider their contract fulfilled and they will be free to return to Darujhistan. If the city is already under siege, Keruli believes he can enter the city under his own power.
Stonny angrily decries the plan, then storms off to lead the way to the Barghast. Harllo openly lusts after her to the discomfort of Gruntle, Keruli, and myself, as they approach the trio of warriors. We get some of Erikson's great gear description of the three siblings, led by the eldest, a woman named Hetan. Hetan is a woman of few words and simple pleasures, and I'm baffled at how horny this chapter has been, is, and is going to be. But Harllo takes to the woman readily, with Stonny encouraging Hetan to save them all the trouble of his presence by killing him. The Barghast are out here hunting after a group of demons who have been terrorizing the plane for the last few months, and it is Netok, the second brother's first hunt. Ah, wonderful starting place, a nice, breezy affair, I'm sure.
Much later, Hetan and Gruntle are the last two awake by the fire, so the Captain decides to inquire after the nature of these demons. So, as promised, I'll be up front about something. Of all the secrets in Malazan, the undead dinosaurs with swords for arms are by far the worst kept in the fandom.* So when we have a group of monsters smelling of death and blades for arms, well I could tell what was coming. However, I was a little surprised at just how... bug-ish, they were described here. Almost seeming to be a mantis-like mega-insect in the vein of Quorls. Especially with the later reference to them threading the landscape with web-like tripwire sorcery. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
*Another being Beak, something-something, 🕯🕯🕯 whatever that's about.
Another tidbit of note is that the shouldermen of the White Faces have seen these creatures in their dreams... Kulburat? The naming scheme could loosely correlate, but I admit the connection is tenuous. Anyway, for now, they consider the fact that these "demons" might well be advance parties of the Pannion Domin, and prepare to face them. And for now, well, these people don't really waste much time, do they? The vaguely-distressing bedroll exploits of the caravanassi has certainly been one of the sub-plots of all time.
In the morning, they continue to head east as the Barghast Range meets them from the north, a growing number of mounds acting as burial sites. Trees buried upside-down marking each one and holding the spirits within at bay. I've noticed before that a lot of the pastoral societies interact with many of the same realities, such as the spirit-world adjacent mechanics we saw on seven cities. Just interesting. We learn some of this from Hetan, who describes the way the Barghast contain their wandering dead, and how the cooperative ones send dreams to the Barghast shouldermen. What's more, many of the various spirits about have sent dreams warning about these demons, attesting to their threat.
Cafal and Stonny return from up ahead, warning of a situation. Bauchaelian's waggon has been destroyed, although the oxen are undisturbed. The group makes their way forward as one, warry of any further danger. The Captain examines the wagon, forcefully torn apart, and inspects the contents inside. Among other magical instruments is what I can only describe as an organ-golem. Ah, the other middle-rational fear makes an appearance. Gruntle, for his part, once again worries after Buke.
He doesn't have long to worry, however, as the foursome make their way back to their wagons wreckage. Buke looks a decade older, Emancipor Reese seems deeply shaken, while Bauchaelin and Broach seem barely fazed. Hetan instinctively dislikes the approaching men, but Gruntle strongly warns them against trying any hostilities. As they approach, the Barghast look into the nearby defiled grave, methodically torn up, with the spirit now removed. The necromancers approach and Bauchaelin launches off into a welcome followed quickly by mussing on the Barghast peoples. We learn, to my surprise, that there are apparently Barghast tribes on other continents, with deeply similar customs. It would seem that these people have a diaspora of their own, but from where do they hail?The Barghast themselves seem to be uncurious as to their origins or are at least better at keeping secrets than what Bauchaelin could draw from his new pet shaman ghost.
The necromancers also, ah, seem to be rather poor in the inter-cultural dialogue aspects of their hobby. Both B&KB have rather unkind dispositions towards the Barghast cultures and even worse interactions with the Barghast themselves. Bauchaelin calls the Barghast ways "anathema to progress, or so I have concluded given the evidence." He states that the Bargast did not fall from some "civilized height into savagery," while Broach "corrects" the efficacy of their burial ritual.* It would seem that Erikson is tackling a particular genre of "archeology" and "anthropology" with these two. While I have no reason to assume that anything they say is, on paper, incorrect I cannot help but assume that the attitude from which these two are acting is deeply counter-productive to their own goals. While I don't doubt the Barghast culture has real, identifiable problems, writing off a whole people for their vices is deeply harmful to everyone involved. And this is to say nothing of their literal graverobbing and corpse desecration. These two are like the worst of Indiana-Jones and Victorian era "anthropologists" rolled into one.
*Which, I'll notice, seems to include rudimentary soul-shift puppets.
Regardless, for all the deep faults of these two, Keruli believes that the best course of action to move forward is to forge an alliance to make it past the undead creatures all around them. Hetan sharply opposes this idea, for a variety of reasons, but ultimately acquiesces to the dire pragmatism of the situation. Her protests also reference something known as the "bone-circle" which seems to be an empowerment ritual of some sort. But for now, the group will travel as one against the Pannion's(?) forces.
B&KB set to repairing their carrige while Gruntle speaks with Buke, begging the man to finish his business with the necromancers as soon as possible. But Buke does not beleive that the group will live to see the dawn. One of the creatures was enough to wipe through most of the duo's backstock of horrors, and the pair is far more spent then they let on. When the monsters return, Hood will accompany them. We also get a passing mention that Emancipoor Reese's cat ran off, but we can talk about that later.

Attack of the Zombie Dinosaurs with Swords for Arms

Seriously, what else would I name this section?
Having repaired the cairage, the group continues on, hoping to make another league or two before nightfall. Gruntle takes the time to lay into Buke, claiming that it is his friend's ego that renders him so obsessed with a tragic end. In the discussion, Gruntle acknowledges to himself that he is somewhat speaking to himself, fearing that his life may need to take a turn like Buke's to right itself.
Eventually, they camp for the night, and Hetan decides to continue her inspection of the caravanasi, demanding Harllo follow her out into the darkness. Stony is (hypocritically, it is pointed out) outraged, and decides to get back at Hetan by breaking in Netok. The whole drama has some interesting character work to it but I'm a prude and will elect to circle back to this when relevant.
Thankfully, the nightmare monsters in the dark begin to approach to interrupt this episode of drama. Reese's cat returns in warning and Bauchaelin barks fighting orders to the group. Broach lights up the region, and our busy bees return, sheepish or annoyed as their various dispositions mandate. We get a fun gearing-up scene, with equal parts of Eriksonian weapon-nerd-isms and faint traces of our setting's RPG roots.
Gruntle prepares himself, watching this all unfold when his attention is drawn by Keruli. The man admits that he can offer only small protection, and Gruntle gives orders accordingly. Keruli then notes that his god is Elder and newly awakened after thousands of years, and it is here the other shoe drops. Keruli... K'Rul. This is some Old Ben Kenobi type nonsense, but it'll have to do. I'm mostly certain that this is K'Rul himself, but I don't really have anything to go off of other than vibes.
The demons approach, now five when there were three last night. These creatures are tactical, it seems, noting the greater group requires a greater response. Then, chasing the sticksnared shaman, the creatures arrive. Taller than a man, raptor-esque, pale and dry, the K'Chain Che'Malle emerge. It would seem that these are of the hunter-chaste, armed and armored. K(e)rul(i) confirms this and notes that these creatures are a distant memory even to the Elder Gods, (we know this by the fact that their civilization was already in ruins in the time of the early Jaghut Wars) and he can offer little in the way of deeper insights. I admit, the fact that our Malaz-dino's were the K'Chain Che'Malle was news to me, so I was pretty stoked that these guys were not only present, but sapient.
The ensuing fight is great, a quick frenzy of two unknown sides testing each other. In a Doyliest sense, it provides us an excuse to clock and estimate the capabilities of the various new factions we've been meeting. But our group starts losing pretty hard before the brute force of the K'Chain Che'Malle and their cunning tactics. It all ends with the life ebbing from Gruntle before the fight's end, and with that, fades Chapter 6 and Book 1. I expect he's not fully done, given the close proximity of necromancers, but there'll likely be some pretty nasty gut-strings attached to that arrangement.

Book 1: The Spark and the Ashes

And that is the opening quarter-ish of Memories of Ice! Deeply riveting and evocative stuff. Erikson has come a long way since our first landing on Genebakis and it really, really shows. The threat of the Crippled God and the Pannion Domin serves as a good center thrust for the narrative this time around, while all of our other plots spiral about these focuses.
The Silverfox/Paran drama, for example, has taken a series of very interesting turns, and I expect there will be many more before time is out. Both of these star-crossed lovers are interesting subversions of a more classic Chosen one trope, for example, being less chosen and more side-effects of deeper, less personal powers. Silverfox was born knowing her role and accepting it, Ganoes went through his entire jading arc before he was revealed as Jen'isand Rul, and now rejects any further adventures.
All of the Elder drama has taken many more layers, and will likely have even farther-reaching effects than what I can now see. What's more, we have some slight syncing up with Deadhouse Gates, and I'm interested to see the continued aftershocks of those events (for example, our shapeshifters don't seem bothered by the Path of Hands, so it may well be either a more localized or opt-in event than I had originally understood)
As for the Cripled God, I suspect that his whole deal will hang around for a while (my gut suggests the end of the series for reasons I assume to be obvious) but it is cool we're seeing his arc start here. And of course, the horrors of the Pannion War loom in the horizon, and I, for one, cannot wait to watch it all unfold!

Hi, I was in the autism forum talking about feeling shame/being lazy for prioritizing mental health over work, I told that for me, getting deeper in the connection between neurodivergence and anti-work movement was key for stoping feeling that kind of shame. Some one asked me to elaborate on the topic and I got this block of text which I wanted to share here too:
1.- For me anti-work is/must be connected with anarchist thought. There are some fascinating books by anarchist that changed my perspective about work, for example, "Bullshit jobs" by David Graeber (link to a brief paper with some of the central thesis of the book: https://davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/2013-On-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-A-work-rant.pdf). In this book I learned that some of the most prominent economists of the first half of the XX century, like Keynes, predicted that by our time, productivity benefits of automation have would led to a 15-hour workweek. Why this not happen? three reasons:
A.- The benefits extracted from technological advances has been reinvested into industry and consumer growth, that means, those benefits went to the pockets of the 1% instead being use to give us all a better life.
B.- The dynamics of consumer growth for it's own sake, produced a tons of "bullshit jobs" (hence the book title), jobs that are completely pointless, unnecessary, or even detrimental to the well being of society (Lobbysts, corporate lawyers, middle managment, leadership proffesionals, store greeters, administrative assistants, marketing specialist) I would ad CEO's to the list. The list is limited, but the point is there has been algo a bullshitization of jobs. We know for example, most office jobs can achieve ideal productivity at a fraction of the time.
C.- The ideological imposition by capitalism of puritan work ethics. The central point is, this ideology is not ahistorical, even in medieval times people felt less guilty about not working that we do. There is a good video essay by historia civilis on the topic, I will leave it here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo)
So, we finally got the technological achievements to satisfy the basic needs of all the population of the world with working a fraction of what we actually do, but instead we live in a world of artificial scarcity where is more virtuous to do fantasy invented jobs, just to be able to pretend that we are working and we are loving it, than to prioritize mental health, self improvement, social bonds, happiness, and all things that clearly are more important in life than work. And all of this because an imposed ideology than even medieval peasants would consider absurd! It´s a setup! there is no other way no put it.
2.- I live in Mexico, in my country is very common to hear (especially by politician, businessmen), that Mexico is a country of "huevones". Huevones is an offensive way of saying "flojo", lazy. But this is completely BS, Mexico is the OCDE country with most yearly worked hours by workers, and also one with the worst salaries! Just check this graphic on the topic: (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1Bsx_DWAAEad26?format=jpg&name=large)
Politicians and bussinessmen want us to think that we are poor because we are lazy and don't work enough, when we are the country with most hours worked yearly, again, what it is this if not a setup? Of course Mexico is just an extreme example, even in the best paid countries people don't receive the value of their time, beceause as I say later, the benefits of the rise of productivity in our labor went to just to 1% pocket.
3.- My own personal experience. I work as an assistant researcher at the national university. I do 85% of my boss work for 15% of his salary. because I was born poor and without contacts, and the university is like everything in Mexico, profoundly corrupt, I will never have a better position than this. One day I realized that not only I do most of the job my boss get credit for, I also use a lot of my free time doing reasearch and writing my own papers (because I truly love research, even if I hate my job). In seven years working in the university I have published 15 papers on my own, finished a book I'm currently self publishing, and there is another book which I already wrote 50-60%. In this time I also got my masters degree in social sciences, for which I wrote a thesis that implied almost the work of another book. Event with all of this, some years ago, I still felt guilty and lazy for faking sick days to deal with burnout!
I think if you analyze deeply your work, most of the times you will find that you're not only sacrificing a lot of hours to create value for others that work less than you, but also that even with that dehumanizing burden, we still do everything possible to find strenght to work on the things we truly love, and that is truly admirable.
Some years ago I decided that I will never again feel guilty for not coping subsimissively with neoslavery, and that no worker should feel shame for chosing life and happiness againts masquerade opression we call work.

Chapter 1. - Introduction
The subject which this chapter is designed to introduce is likely to meet with a decidedly mixed reception. Some readers will probably be very disappointed when they see the title of this book, considering the subject quite unattractive and unedifying. If so, they are to be pitied; we hope that God will bless the contents to them. Medicine is proverbially unpleasant, but there are times when all of us find it necessary and beneficial. Others will be thankful that, by divine grace, we seek to glorify God rather than please the flesh. And surely that which most glorifies God is to declare "all his counsel," to insist on that which puts man in his proper place before Him, and to emphasize those portions and aspects of the truth which our generation is most in need of. As we shall endeavor to show, our theme is one of immense doctrinal importance and of great practical value. Since it is a subject which occupies
A Vital Contemporary Question
It is our deep conviction that the vital question most requiring to be raised today is this: Is man a totally and thoroughly depraved creature by nature? Does he enter the world completely ruined and helpless, spiritually blind and dead in trespasses and sins? According as is our answer to that question, so will be our views on many others. It is on the basis of this dark background that the whole Bible proceeds. Any attempt to modify or abate, repudiate or tone down the teaching of Scripture on the matter is fatal. Put the question in another form: Is man now in such a condition that he cannot be saved without the special and direct intervention of the triune God on his behalf? In other words, is there any hope for him apart from his personal election by the Father, his particular redemption by the Son, and the supernatural operations of the Spirit within him? Or, putting it in still another way: If man is a totally depraved being, can he possibly take the first step in the matter of his return to God?
The Scriptural Answer
The scriptural answer to that question makes evident the utter futility of the schemes of social reformers for "the moral elevation of the masses," the plans of politicians for the peace of the nations, and the ideologies of dreamers to usher in a golden age for this world. It is both pathetic and tragic to see many of our greatest men putting their faith in such chimeras. Divisions and discords, hatred and bloodshed, cannot be banished while human nature is what it is. But during the past century the steady trend of a deteriorating Christendom has been to underrate the evil of sin and overrate the moral capabilities of men. Instead of proclaiming the heinousness of sin, there has been a dwelling more upon its inconveniences, and the abasing portrayal of the lost condition of man as set forth in Holy Writ has been obscured if not obliterated by flattering disquisitions on human advancement. If the popular religion of the churches—including nine-tenths of what is termed "evangelical Christianity—be tested at this point, it will be found that it clashes directly with man's fallen, ruined and spiritually dead condition.
There is therefore a crying need today for sin to be viewed in the light of God's law and gospel, so that its exceeding sinfulness may be demonstrated, and the dark depths of human depravity exposed by the teaching of Holy Writ, that we may learn what is connoted by those fearful words "dead in trespasses and sins." The grand object of the Bible is to make God known to us, to portray man as he appears in the eyes of his Maker, and to show the relation of one to the other. It is therefore the business of His servants not only to declare the divine character and perfections, but also to delineate the original condition and apostasy of man, as well as the divine remedy for his ruin. Until we really behold the horror of the pit in which by nature we lie, we can never properly appreciate Christ's so-great salvation. In man's fallen condition we have the awful disease for which divine redemption is the only cure, and our estimation and valuation of the provisions of divine grace will necessarily be modified in proportion as we modify the need it was meant to meet.
David Clarkson, one of the Puritans, pointed out this fact in his sermon on Psalm 51:5:
The end of the ministry of the Gospel is to bring sinners unto Christ. Their way to this end lies through the sense of their misery without Christ. The ingredients of this misery are our sinfulness, original and actual; the wrath of God, whereto sin has exposed us; and our impotency to free ourselves either from sin or wrath. That we may therefore promote this great end, we shall endeavour, as the Lord will assist, to lead you in this way, by the sense of misery, to Him who alone can deliver from it. Now the original of our misery being the corruption of our nature, or original sin, we thought fit to begin here, and therefore have pitched upon these words as very proper for our purpose: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me."
Characteristics of the Doctrine
This subject is indeed a most solemn one, and none can fitly write or preach on it unless his own heart is deeply awed by it. It is not something from which any man can detach himself and expatiate on it as though he were not directly involved in it; still less as from a higher level looking down on those whom he denounces. Nothing is more incongruous and unbecoming than for a young preacher glibly to rattle off passages of Scripture which portray his own vileness by nature. Rather should they be read or quoted with the utmost gravity. J. O. Philpot stated:
As no heart can sufficiently conceive, so no tongue can adequately express, the state of wretchedness and ruin into which sin has cast guilty, miserable man. In separating him from God, it severed him from the only source of all happiness and holiness. It has ruined him body and soul: the one it has filled with sickness and disease; in the other it has defaced and destroyed the image of God in which it was created. It has made him love sin and hate God.
The doctrine of total depravity is a very humbling one. It is not that man leans to one side and needs propping up, nor that he is merely ignorant and requires instructing, nor that he is run down and calls for a tonic; but rather that he is undone, lost, spiritually dead. Consequently, he is "without strength," thoroughly incapable of bettering himself; he is exposed to the wrath of God, and unable to perform a single work which can find acceptance with Him. Almost every page of the Bible bears witness to this truth. The whole scheme of redemption takes it for granted. The plan of salvation taught in the Scriptures could have no place on any other supposition. The impossibility of any man's gaining the approbation of God by works of his own appears plainly in the case of the rich young ruler who came to Christ. Judged by human standards, he was a model of virtue and religious attainments. Yet, like all others who trust in self-efforts, he was ignorant of the spirituality and strictness of God's law; when Christ put him to the test his fair expectations were blown to the winds and "he went away sorrowful" (Matt. 19:22).
It is therefore a most unpalatable doctrine. It cannot be otherwise, for the unregenerate love to hear of the greatness, the dignity, the nobility of man. The natural man thinks highly of himself and appreciates only that which is flattering. Nothing pleases him more than to listen to that which extols human nature and lauds the state of mankind, even though it be in terms which not only repudiate the teaching of God's Word but are flatly contradicted by common observation and universal experience. And there are many who pander to him by their lavish praises of the excellency of civilization and the steady progress of the race. Hence, to have the lie given to the popular theory of evolution is highly displeasing to its deluded votaries. Nevertheless, the duty of God's servants is to stain the pride of all that man glories in, to strip him of his stolen plumes, to lay him low in the dust before God. However repugnant such teaching is, God's emissary must faithfully discharge his duty "whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear" (Ezek. 3:11).
This is no dismal dogma invented by the church in "the dark ages," but a truth of Holy Writ. George Whitefleld said, "I 1ook upon it not merely as a doctrine of Scripture—the great Fountain of truth—but a very fundamental one, from which I hope God will suffer none of you to be enticed." It is a subject to which great prominence is given in the Bible. Every part of the Scriptures has much to say on the awful state of degradation and slavery into which the fall has brought man. The corruption, the blindness, the hostility of all Adam's descendants to everything of a spiritual nature are constantly insisted upon. Not only is man’s utter ruin fully described, but also his powerlessness to save himself from the same. In the declarations and denunciations of the prophets, of Christ and His apostles, the bondage of all men to Satan and their complete impotence to turn to God for deliverance are repeatedly set forth-not indirectly and vaguely, but emphatically and in great detail. This is one of a hundred proofs that the Bible is not a human invention but a communication from the thrice holy One.
It is a sadly neglected subject. Notwithstanding the clear and uniform teaching of Scripture, man’s ruined condition and alienation from God are but feebly apprehended and seldom heard in the modern pulpit, and are given little place even in what are regarded as the centers of orthodoxy. Rather the whole trend of present-day thought and teaching is in the opposite direction, and even where the Darwinian hypothesis has not been accepted, its pernicious influences are often seen. In consequence of the guilty silence of the modern pulpit, a generation of churchgoers has arisen which is deplorably ignorant of the basic truths of the Bible, so that perhaps not more than one in a thousand has even a mental knowledge of the chains of hardness and unbelief which bind the natural heart, or of the dungeon of darkness in which they lie. Thousands of preachers, instead of faithfully telling their hearers of their woeful state by nature, are wasting their time by relating the latest news of the Kremlin or of the development of nuclear weapons.
It is therefore a testing doctrine, especially of the preacher's soundness in the faith. A man's orthodoxy on this subject determines his viewpoint of many other doctrines of great importance. If his belief here is a scriptural one, then he will clearly perceive how impossible it is for men to improve themselves—that Christ is their only hope. He will know that unless the sinner is born again there can be no entrance for him into the kingdom of God. Nor will he entertain the idea of the fallen creature's free will to attain goodness. He will be preserved from many errors. Andrew Fuller stated, "I never knew a person verge toward the Arminian, the Arian, the Socinian, the Antinomian schemes, without first entertaining diminutive notions of human depravity or blameworthiness." Said the well-equipped theological instructor, J. M. Stifler, "It cannot be said too often that a false theology finds its source in inadequate views of depravity."
It is a doctrine of great practical value as well as spiritual importance. The foundation of all true piety lies in a correct view of ourselves and our vileness, and a scriptural belief in God and His grace. There can be no genuine abhorrence or repentance, no real appreciation of the saving mercy of God, no faith in Christ, without it, There is nothing like a knowledge of this doctrine so well calculated to undeceive vain man and convict him of the worthlessness and rottenness of his own righteousness. Yet the preacher who is aware of the plague of his own heart knows full well that he cannot present this truth in such a way as to make his hearers actually realize and feel the same, to help them stop being in love with themselves and to cause them to forever renounce all hope in themselves. Therefore, instead of relying upon his faithfulness in presenting the truth, he will be cast upon God to apply it graciously in power to those who hear him and bless his feeble efforts.
It is an exceedingly illuminating doctrine. It may be a melancholy and humiliating one, nevertheless it throws a flood of light upon mysteries which are otherwise insoluble. It supplies the key to the course of human history, and shows why so much of it has been written in blood and tears. It supplies an explanation of many problems which sorely perplex and puzzle the thoughtful. It reveals why the child is prone to evil and has to be taught and disciplined to anything that is good. It explains why every improvement in man’s environment, every attempt to educate him, all the efforts of social reformers, are unavailing to effect any radical betterment in his nature and character. It accounts for the horrible treatment which Christ met with when He worked so graciously in this world, and why He is still despised and rejected by men. It enables the Christian himself to better understand the painful conflict which is ever at work within him, and which causes him so often to cry, "Oh, wretched man that I am!"
It is therefore a most necessary doctrine, for the vast majority of our fellowmen are ignorant of it. God's servants are sometimes thought to speak too strongly and dolefully of the dreadful state of man through his apostasy from God. The fact is that it is impossible to exaggerate in human language the darkness and pollution of man's heart or to describe the misery and utter helplessness of a condition such as the Word of truth describes in these solemn passages: "But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them" (2 Cor. 4:3A). "Therefore they could not believe, because he hath [judicially] blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them" (John 12:39-40). This is yet more evident when we contrast the state of soul of those in whom a miracle of grace is wrought (see Luke 1:78-79).
It is a salutary doctrine—one which God often uses to bring men to their senses. While we imagine that our wills have power to do what is pleasing to God, we never abandon dependence on self. Not that a mere intellectual knowledge of man's fall and ruin is sufficient to deliver from pride. Only the Spirit's powerful operations can effect that Yet He is pleased to use the faithful preaching of the Word to that end. Nothing but a real sense of our lost condition lays us in the dust before God.

The Ficnapping is here and yet again set upon us for the third time, orchestrated by the diabolical u/oobanooba-! Today I present to you my own victim, Of Giants and Journalists by acceptable_egg5560, who shall be mercilessly subjected to a Christmas One-shot fraught with Ugly Sweaters, Eggnog, and Holiday Cheer!
I realize I’ve been tasked with filling the shoes of a very large, influential, and popular series for this community project and I’ve tried to do my best to live up to the standards and expectations set forth for me with that in mind. I hope you all enjoy my attempt to explain the true meaning of Christmas as well as some Venlil folklore of my own creation. If you like what you see feel free to check out some of my other works, The Nature of Family & Empty Eyes.
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Memory transcript: Tarlim, Venbig. Date: [Standardized human time] December, 2137
“Well, this is new.” I said aloud, looking at the strange ring of dense, thistly branches topped with a sparkly ribbon that had been meticulously arranged and adhered to the front door of Jacob’s apartment. “Do either of you have any idea what this is or why it’s stuck to Jacobs front door?”
“Hmm…” Sharnet inspected the decoration quizzically, “it looks like some kind of wreath made of tree branches but I don’t know why it’s here.”
“It’s probably just some sort of human thing.” Vekna suggested as she ran the ribbon through her claws. “You’re his partner. You’d have a better idea than either of us. Has he mentioned anything about it recently?”
“Not that I can think of, though he has been acting a bit strangely lately.” Thinking back on it, Jacob had been unusually reserved and quiet the past few paws; secretive, as though he were hiding something from me.
“Well, Jacob invited us all over for a reason and there's one surefire way to find out.” Without further delay Sharnet knocked forcefully on the door. “We’ll just have to ask him ourselves.”
After a few moments of banging and clanging from inside, the door swung open enthusiastically revealing the smiling face of my favorite Texan garbed in the most unusual attire I'd ever seen. Atop his head was nestled a fuzzy red cap with a white rim and puffball on the top that flopped down onto his face. That, however, was the least puzzling aspect of his appearance. His shirt was fluffy and soft, looking as though he had grown out a wool coat of his own, and dyed with garish hues of red, white, and green arranged in jagged stripes. An ensemble of tiny bells stitched into the front rang out in discordant chimes at his every motion and yet the strangest thing of all was the design which decorated the center of his chest. Boldly looking back at us with unnaturally binocular eyes were three crudely depicted venlil, one substantially larger than all the rest, and a blue spaceman holding hands in front of a large tree littered with colorful bulbs and topped with a twinkling star.
“Howdy everyone!” Jacob waved us all inside. “I’m so glad y’all could make it! Merry Christmas!”
“Is that supposed to be… us?” Vekna asked, pointing at the hideously ugly shirt.
“Why are there tree branches on your front door?” Sharnet inquired.
“What's a Christmas?” I replied dumbfounded.
“Woah, woah, woah.” Jacob held up his hands to fend off our onslaught of questions. “One thing at a time. I suppose I did spring all this on y'all a tad suddenly, but just come on in and make yourselves comfy. I’ll answer all your questions.”
Entering into his domicile I was startled to see that the entire space had been transformed into a colorful display of twinkling tinsel, ostentatious ornamentation, and gaudy garnishment. Red and green seemed to be the hues of choice, though a large number of white, almost star-like, geometric patterns cut from paper and hung by string dangled from the ceiling. Also featured prominently were depictions of bulbous stacks of white balls wearing human clothing, what looked to be brown suleans hauling a large sleigh, and numerous instances of a particular elderly human with a poofy white beard. The fat man was dressed in an all red suit with white fur accents and wore the exact same hat as Jacob. A large green tree matching the one on Jacobs shirt stood in the corner of the room, covered with assorted knick-knacks and trinkets that shined in the rainbow glow of lights enveloping the foliage. The tree was wrapped with a red, white, and green paper chain, and topped with a star-shaped light that gave the entire room a warm, comforting ambiance. In the middle of the room stood a dining table which held a large plate full of cookies, three boxes wrapped with decorative paper, a small house that looked to be made of crackers, and a large carton.
“Feel free to help yourselves to some cookies,” Jacob insisted as he walked over to the apartments small strayu forge and donned a pair of gloves, removing yet another tray from within, “I made a ton of them and I’ve got more coming. I learned my lesson from last time too. No butter this time.” Vekna seemed to shudder at the mention of the word. “Completely vegan… Oh!” Jacob added as almost an afterthought. “And don’t drink the eggnog! It’s got milk and… well, eggs in it. Like the name implies.”
Ugh. This time it was my turn to shudder. Why was it always Milk? Sharnet seemed to share my disgust, though her particular fixation seemed to come at the mention of eggs. The three of us sat down, far from the offending carton of predatory beverage, and Vekna cautiously took one of the cookies, her tail swaying happily as she took a tentative nibble.
“So Jacob,” I broached the topic once more as he lay down his latest tray of culinary treats, “what’s going on? What’s all… this?” I gestured to the… everything around me.
“Well Ah’m just gettin into the Christmas spirit!” he replied merrily. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year don’t ya know?”
“Actually we don’t.” Sharnet reminded him. “Why don’t you tell us about it?”
“Yeah, what’s this Christmas thing all about and why are you wearing that… nice… shirt with all of us on it?” Vekna added.
“Aw, shoot, I keep getting ahead of myself.” Jacob gave himself a light, smack on the forehead. “Of course y’all wouldn’t know about Christmas. I’m real glad you like the sweater though, cause I got all y’all something special as Christmas presents.”
Picking up the colorful wrapped boxes, Jacob placed one in each of our paws and ushered us to unwrap them. Tearing open the paper with a mix of excitement and apprehension at what I would find within, I was horrified to discover my suspicions confirmed. Inside was a hideously ugly sweater of giant proportions, a perfect match to the one Jacob himself wore. Looking aside at Sharnet and Vekna I could see that they too had received the same gift and were likewise restraining their less than enthused reactions.
“Matching wool sweaters!” Jacob broke out into an enormous, exuberant grin. “One of the refugees down at the shelter, the sweetest old grannie you’ve ever seen, was hankering for something to knit so I asked her to make these special. You like ‘em? Why don’t you try them on?”
“Did you say these were made of… wool?” Sharnet asked apprehensively and Vekna dropped the garment back into the box.
“Well… yeah,” Jacob responded, sounding a little disheartened, “but it’s not any bother. It’s sheeps wool. They ain’t troubled by it none. Sheep like being sheared actually. It’s good for ‘em. Humans just give them a little trim once they get a tad too fluffy and we make clothing out of it.”
Despite the somewhat disturbing nature of the sweater's origins and its utterly repugnant appearance, I couldn’t stand to see Jacob upset by our lack of appreciation for what had clearly been a very thoughtful and well-intentioned gift. Bracing myself, I slide it over my head and pull it down around me, smothering my own wool and causing it to pool out at the openings. Wearing the unsightly creation feels like being embraced by a soft, full-body hug. A slightly itchy hug.
“Well I think it’s great.” I say proudly, giving a subtle side-eye to Sharnet and Vekna. “Thank you very much Jacob.”
With some reluctance the two girls also put on the sweaters, following my lead, and Jacob smiles once again.
“Yeah,” Sharnet adds, “thank you Jacob.”
“Very… Thoughtful of you.” Vekna follows-up.
“I’m glad to hear it!” Jacob beams. “Tis the season of giving afterall! You know, at first I was worried y’all might not like ‘em, but ugly sweaters are a Christmas tradition!”
“Wait…” Vekna says as the three of us stare in slack-jawed disbelief, “They're supposed to look like this!”
Jacob simply bursts out laughing in response. “Well yeah! No one actually thinks Christmas sweaters look good! That’s not the point of them. They’re just fun and I thought it would be nice to have a memento of our first Christmas together.”
“Alright, enough stalling,” I say with a jolly chuckle, “time to tell us the big secret about what Christmas is.”
“Right, I still haven’t told y’all, but it’s no secret.” Jacob sat down at the table with us and poured himself a glass of his noxious egg-milk. “Christmas is one of my favorite holidays. Technically the name has religious significance and the holiday is intended to celebrate the birth of the Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ, but these days the holiday has become pretty commercialized and lots of people celebrate it even if they’re not Christians. A lot of Christmas traditions actually pre-date Christianity and come from a variety of winter festival celebrations. I suppose we Humans just love having a reason to celebrate. The main takeaway is that Christmas is about the spirit of giving, spending time with friends and family, and generally being appreciative of what you have.”
“So is Jesus Christ the man in the red suit?” Sharnet inquires. “Is that why I keep seeing him everywhere and why you’re wearing that hat?”
“Oh no,” Jacob is quick to reject the notion, “that’s Santa Claus, Jolly ol Saint Nick, Father Christmas himself. He travels the whole world in a single night in his magic sleigh pulled by flying reindeer and delivers presents to children, sneaking into their house on Christmas eve and leaving them what they deserve under the Christmas tree. You see, Santa Claus is always watching and he knows if you’ve been naughty or nice. If you’ve been nice he leaves you presents, but if you’ve been naughty he leaves you a big lump of coal.”
“That sounds terrifying.” Vekna states plainly. “I do not like the idea of some strange human spying on me constantly and breaking into my house while I’m asleep, even if he does leave me a gift.”
“Oh, he’s not like that.” Jacob lept to the defense of the reverse-burglar with celerity. “Santa Claus is the nicest guy ever! Everyone loves Santa Claus and Santa loves everybody.”
“So who is Jesus Christ then?” Sharnet circles back to her original question. “He must be pretty important if the whole holiday is named after him.”
“Well, like I said earlier, you don’t need to be Christian to celebrate Christmas so don’t let that bother you any.” Jacob took a cookie from the platter and dipped it into his drink as he talked. “Heck, at one point Christian Puritans actually banned Christmas for a little while. To answer your question though, Jesus Christ is the son of God and Christmas is supposedly his birthday. He’s famous for being crucified, tortured to death for crimes he didn’t commit, in order to forgive humanity of our sins so that people can be redeemed and go to heaven.”
“You murdered your own god!” Sharnet was incensed. “That’s got to be one of the most predatory things I’ve ever heard!”
“I mean… kinda?” Jacob shoved the cookie into his mouth and looked between the three of us awkwardly. “The point of the story is that he could have avoided it, but chose not to. It’s supposed to be symbolic of sacrifice and forgiveness… I’m sorry. I’m doing a real bad job of explaining this. The UN probably wouldn’t even want me to be talking about this sort of thing…”
“On second thought,” Vekna says, “I think I’ll take the story about the creepy man who leaves me presents rather than the story about torturing an innocent person to death.”
“I think I sorta get it.” I said, thinking back to an old fable I’d heard long ago. “It’s sorta like the Long Crossing of Father Talgim.”
“That sounds interesting.” Jacob said. “What’s that story about?”
I cleared my throat and began to recite the tale.
“A long time ago, before the coming of the Builder, it was said that the Venlil lived on the other side of the world in a dangerous land full of vicious predators. The people were desperate to leave those lands for a better place, but they were trapped on all sides by treacherous waters filled with deadly leviathans. One day a elderly stranger appeared to the venlil of the village, a vagrant exiled for transgressions long ago forgotten by all but the stars above, and charged with an impossible quest in order to redeem himself. He was to embark on a hopeless search for a safe haven free from monsters, a place thought not to exist in all the world, and yet… he did. In what were surely the final years of his long life he had done the impossible and found paradise. He could have easily stayed amidst the gentle meadows and rolling hills, where the fruit trees were plentiful and the predators vacant, but deep within him he could not shake the feeling that to truly be happy he needed his kin to share in his joy. So it was that he left his garden, delving back deep into the inhospitable wastes of the predator-lands, and returned to guide his people to heaven.”
“The people were skeptical and distrustful of the stranger, but in their desperation they agreed to follow him. He led the people on a grueling journey through frozen wastes and burning desserts, up steep cliffs and down narrow valleys, forging on ahead through all obstacles until at last the people felt they could go no further. Exhausted, they came to a narrow, natural bridge of rock spanning a bottomless crevasse that seemed to stretch far into the horizon. The people were scared to cross, fearful that even one wrong step would mean their deaths, but the stranger, whose name was Talgim, reassured them that it was a crossing they must undertake.”
“Still the people were wary to cross, but unbeknown to them they were being stalked by Krathralei, the mother of all terrors, and her pack. Krathralei bore down upon the encampment of venlil at the edge of the canyon just as they were settling in for their rest claw, but Talgim was foretold of her coming by the stars. He roused the sleeping venlil and bade them at once to cross the bridge. At last, they did, but as they fled the horrors of Krathralei they asked Teglim ‘How are we to escape this monster? Surely she shall follow us across the bridge into the promised land!’ But Teglim simply replied ‘No, she shall not.’ and bade them to make haste, trusting the stars above to guide them to the promised land while he stayed behind to confront Krathralei. As the last of the villagers began their crossing Krathralei and her pack made it to the bridge.”
“Talgim stood his ground against the horrors, stood atop the center of the bridge, and spoke to Krathralei saying ‘You shall not taste the flesh of my kin on this day or any other.’ and struck his cane against the rock. Krathralei was amused by the insolence of the frail old man and taunted him saying ‘I and my kin will gorge ourselves upon you and yours until the stars above cease to shine.’ and advanced slowly upon Talgim. Striking the bridge with his cane a second time Talgim replied ‘No! You shall never cross this bridge and you shall never hunt my people again!’ but Krathralei was undaunted by such weak prey. She strode up to Talgim and snarled in his face saying to him ‘You will not have to worry yourself over their fate, for you won’t live long enough to know it.’ and bit into his side with her monstrous jaws. Talgim was undaunted, saying ‘You are wrong, for the light of the stars guide their way and so long as they continue to shine you and your ilk shall never have them!’ and struck the bridge for a third and final time.”
“A great roar was heard throughout the canyon as the ground shook and swayed, sending rocks and boulders plummeting off the sides. The bridge cracked and shattered in twain, sending Teglim and Krathralei both plummeting down into the depths below, cutting off the old world from the new. It was said that on that Paw a new constellation arose in the sky, that of Father Talgim, forevermore standing guard over the venlil people lest Krathralei or her kind ever return. That day marked the beginning of a new era in venlil history, and every year on Crossing paw people gather to celebrate and give thanks to the stars for guiding us into the year to come.”
I concluded my retelling of the tale to applause from Jacob, Sharnet, and Vekna.
“Now that was a good story.” Jacob said encouragingly. “I wish I could have spun y’all a yarn about Christmas that was half as well told.”
“You did a great job of telling your stories.” Vekna said cheerfully as she stuffed another cookie into her mouth. “So what’s next on the list of Christmas traditions?”
Jacob gave a large smile once more. “I was thinking we’d go out and do some caroling!”
“You want us to go out in public and sing!” Vekna sounded nervous. “Dressed like this!”
Jacob just laughed. “I figure the folks at the refugee center will love it. If anyone could do with some Christmas cheer it would be them.”
“Well I think that sounds like a great idea.” I said, rising to my feet and followed shortly thereafter by Sharnet and Vekna.
“I’m really not a good singer though…” Vekna squirmed.
“Nonsense!” Jacob was quick to deny her, “I’m positive y’all are great singers, and no one ever said you had to be good at singing to carol anyway! Some people might find carolers annoying, but it’s all about having fun and spreading Christmas cheer!”
“Are you sure people actually like this holiday?” Sharnet asked with bemusement. “It seems like there’s a lot of traditions involved with it that seem… unpopular.”
“Don’t even get me started on the fruitcake controversy, but yeah, Christmas is the best!” Jacob retorted with cheer. “It's all about spending time with the people you care about and I can't think of anyone I’d rather spend this Christmas with than y’all.”
At Jacob’s words, I could feel a comforting warmth rising in my chest. As I reflected upon the time we’d spent together I was reminded of how much my life had improved since the day we met. It hadn’t always been easy, but I couldn’t be more thankful. Wrapping my paws around him, I pulled Jacob in for a big hug, burying him in the scratchy wool of the ugly sweater.
“I think you're right,” I said happily, “the best gift I could ever ask for is a herd who cares about me, and I couldn't ask for a better herd than the one we have right here.”
“I agree.” Sharnet said, joining into the hug. “This herd means the world to me.”
“You guys are the best herd I’ve ever had.” Vekna wrapped herself around us with her arms wide.
Slowly, the four of us broke away from our collective embrace, and departed for the refugee center, feeling considerably more festive than when we had first arrived. Whistling a merry tune as he led our procession, Jacob spoke up.
“Now, we’re gonna wanna practice a bit before we get there, so pay attention to the lyrics and repeat after me once you get the feeling..” Jacob cleared his throat and began his song...
“Oh! We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas and a Ven-big new year!”

Why the Puritans cracked down on celebrating Christmas

By [Peter C. Mancall](mailto:communication@dornsife.usc.edu), Historian at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Original link https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/puritans-christmas-crackdown/
​
When winter cold settles in across the U.S., the alleged “War on Christmas” heats up.
Department store greeters and Starbucks cups have sparked furor by wishing customers “happy holidays.” When state officials warn of holiday gatherings becoming superspreader events in the midst of a pandemic, opponents cast them as attacks on the Christian holiday.
But debates about celebrating Christmas go back to the 17th century. The Puritans, it turns out, were not too keen on the holiday. They first discouraged Yuletide festivities and later outright banned them.
At first glance, banning Christmas celebrations might seem like a natural extension of a stereotype of the Puritans as joyless and humorless that persists to this day.
But as a scholar who has written about the Puritans, I see their hostility toward holiday gaiety as less about their alleged asceticism and more about their desire to impose their will on the people of New England – Natives and immigrants alike.

An aversion to Christmas chaos

The earliest documentary evidence for their aversion to celebrating Christmas dates back to 1621, when Gov. William Bradford of Plymouth Colony castigated some of the newcomers who chose to take the day off rather than work.

But why?

As a devout Protestant, Bradford did not dispute the divinity of Jesus Christ. Indeed, Puritans spent a great deal of time investigating their own and others’ souls because they were so committed to creating a godly community.
Bradford’s comments reflected Puritans’ lingering anxiety about the ways that Christmas had been celebrated in England. For generations, the holiday had been an occasion for riotous, sometimes violent behavior. The moralist pamphleteer Phillip Stubbes believed that Christmastime celebrations gave celebrants license “to do what they lust, and to folow what vanitie they will.” He complained about rampant “fooleries” like playing dice and cards and wearing masks.
Civil authorities had mostly accepted the practices because they understood that allowing some of the disenfranchised to blow off steam on a few days of the year tended to preserve an unequal social order. Let the poor think they are in control for a day or two, the logic went, and the rest of the year they will tend to their work without causing trouble.
English Puritans objected to accepting such practices because they feared any sign of disorder. They believed in predestination, which led them to search their own and others’ behavior for signs of saving grace. They could not tolerate public scandal, especially when attached to a religious moment.
Puritan efforts to crack down on Christmas revelries in England before 1620 had little impact. But once in North America, these seekers of religious freedom had control over the governments of New Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut.

Puritan intolerance

Boston became the focal point of Puritan efforts to create a society where church and state reinforced each other.
The Puritans in Plymouth and Massachusetts used their authority to punish or banish those who did not share their views. For example, they exiled an Anglican lawyer named Thomas Morton who rejected Puritan theology, befriended local Indigenous people, danced around a maypole and sold guns to the Natives. He was, Bradford wrote, “the Lord of Misrule” – the archetype of a dangerous type who Puritans believed create mayhem, including at Christmas.
In the years that followed, the Puritans exiled others who disagreed with their religious views, including Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams who espoused beliefs deemed unacceptable by local church leaders. In 1659, they banished three Quakers who had arrived in 1656. When two of them, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, refused to leave, Massachusetts authorities executed them in Boston.
This was the context for which Massachusetts authorities outlawed Christmas celebrations in 1659. Even after the statute left the law books in 1681 during a reorganization of the colony, prominent theologians still despised holiday festivities.
In 1687, the minister Increase Mather, who believed that Christmas celebrations derived from the bacchanalian excesses of the Roman holiday Saturnalia, decried those consumed “in Revellings, in excess of wine, in mad mirth.”
The hostility of Puritan clerics to celebrations of Christmas should not be seen as evidence that they always hoped to stop joyous behavior. In 1673, Mather had called alcohol “a good creature of God” and had no objection to moderate drinking. Nor did Puritans have a negative view of sex.
What the Puritans did want was a society dominated by their views. This made them eager to convert Natives to Christianity, which they managed to do in some places. They tried to quash what they saw as usurious business practices within their community, and in Plymouth they executed a teenager who had sex with animals, the punishment prescribed by the Book of Leviticus. When the Puritans believed that Indigenous people might attack them or undermine their economy, they lashed out – most notoriously in 1637, when they set a Pequot village on fire, murdered those who tried to flee and sold captives into slavery.
By comparison to their treatment of Natives and fellow colonists who rebuffed their unbending vision, the Puritan campaign against Christmas seems tame. But it is a reminder of what can happen when the self-righteous control the levers of power in a society and seek to mold a world in their image.
Peter C. Mancall is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Super Secret Information! Do not read further if you value your puritanical chastity. This is ultra lewd for me, a demiromantic asexual. Complete nonbinary perspective. I’m a 6 on the 1-10 fem-to-masc scale.
Okay, so I read this scientific research paper that discusses how T injections works to turn vaginal cells into prostate cells and I have to report on the potential effects on sexual function that may occur, coupled with minimal bottom growth. I want to know if any of y’all fellow FTNB/M have experienced and/or desired near-hermaphroditic satisfaction.
Background: I’m nearly 10 years post partial hysterectomy and probably post menopausal in regards to ovary function. I’m very much looking forward to complete mastectomy top surgery. Started low dose, weekly testosterone injections on 9/19/23. I have some lumbar spinal stenosis. My latest immunosuppressant has started restoring sensation to my groin by reducing inflammation that blocked the neural connections like a subdural during childbirth . When I first started T, I was randomly experiencing flashes of pleasurable sensation pulsing to and from my clitoris. It gave me hope that an attempt to resume masturbation would result in orgasms again. And because of my unmedicated baseline’s lack of strong estrogen production, I feel like the Ts effects have been accelerated. As an asexual person, not being attracted to other people meant if my libido was low to nonexistent it wasn’t of great impact. Sensual pleasure is great in many forms, however. Whether that be a great massage, or the way sand feels between my toes at the beach, or self-induced orgasms. So while the ability to orgasm is nice, I don’t consider it as vital as my senses of sight, taste, and smell.
Somehow, my ability to experience orgasms has not only returned but changed in character and increased in scope. Pulsating full body clitoral climaxes? Check. The clitoris is larger, more prominent, more sensitive. The G-spot zone in my vagina, because of the transformation of surface cellular structure, has gotten more widespread and more easily stimulated via vibrating dildo. Crescendo type tightening buildup until climactic release on vaginal penetration that has a completely different feel as clitoral orgasm and is unlike any former penetrative-induced orgasm? Check.
My body is changing in all sorts of delightful ways. This was just one of many pleasant surprises. And my fantasies, both those I actively think about when seeking orgasm via imaginary scenarios to those I experience in dreams, are from multiple perspectives. Sometimes I’m the guy with a dick or gal with the strap-on doing the penetrating. Sometimes I’m the woman being penetrated. Sometimes I’m the variable gendered person stimulating or being stimulated in other erotic ways. It’s amazing. I don’t want to have sex with anyone in particular, still. But in my brain, I am the object, the subject, the actor, the top, and the bottom.

Previous Part
This part covers the bulk of the trials and their direct causes. If you want ideas for plots, settings, or characters in a Wittebanes prequel story, then this section has got you covered. Every trial has its own story to tell, and each has its own heroes and villains. Maybe you can have Evelyn break the Ayreses out of jail, or maybe an arc where Philip is corrupted by a Roger Ludlow or Samuel Stone inspired characters. Who knows! I think this post is relevant now, let's continue.

1647 - 1654: The Early Witch Trials

The early witch trials in Connecticut were quite scattershot, but they were the deadliest by far. Out of the first 9 trials, 7 ended in execution. Although the later trials are much better documented, I think these trials can teach us a lot about contemporary attitudes.
Alse (Alice) Young

"May 26, 1647, Alse Young was hanged"

This is an entry in the diary of town clerk Matthew Grant, and one of only two scraps of evidence we have of Alse Young's existence. The other is an entry in the journal of John Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts.

"One [blank] of Windsor arraigned and executed at Hartford for a witch."

It is through these two entries that we know that Alse Young was the first witch executed in America.
No court records from her trial exist, so we can only speculate why she was condemned to die. However, it is known that an influenza epidemic spread throughout Connecticut shortly before her execution, causing the deaths of many people. Because of these horrible conditions, it is possible that Alse Young was hanged by out of a need for a scapegoat.
​
Mary Johnson
Mary Johnson was hanged in 1650. She is the first case of an accused witch confessing to her alleged crimes, which included "familiarity with the devil" and getting him to do her chores, as well as murdering a child. Her confession was given under duress, through physical torture and interrogation.
While imprisoned and pregnant with her son, she was visited by Reverend Samuel Stone of Hartford who successfully got Mary to confess and repent for her sins. Soon after giving birth in prison, she was executed. Cotton Mather wrote about the event, as described by Reverend Whiting, Stone's successor:

"She was by most observers judged very Penitent, both before and at her Execution; and she went out of the World with many Hopes of Mercy through the Merit of Jesus Christ ... And she died in a Frame extremely to the Satisfaction of them that were Spectators of it. Our GOD is a great Forgiver."

For his act of converting Mary Johnson and providing her penance, Rev. Stone was made famous in New England.
​
Joanne and John Carrington
We know next to nothing about this case. However, we do know that the Carringtons were quite poor. They had just £23 pounds to their name and had £13 of debt. Furthemore, it is known that John Carrington had previously gotten in trouble for selling a gun to an Indian, which would have been seen as a betrayal of his fellow colonists. The Carringtons were charged with "familiarity with Satan" and were hanged in 1651.
​
Chaos in Fairfield
This story is one of the best documented of the early trials, and one of the most interesting. It is a story of three accused women, Goodwife Bassett, Goodwife Knapp, and Mary Staples, whose fates would intertwine.
Before discussing the accused witches, we must first turn our attention to Roger Ludlow, a key player in all of this. In 1637, while fighting in the Pequot War, he stumbled across land west of New Haven which he thought suitable for a town. In 1639, Ludlow settled that land, founding the town of Fairfield.
In 1652, Cromwell went to war against the Dutch. This was bad news for the young Fairfield since New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony, was right on its doorstep. Afraid that Fairfield could become the front lines in a potential war, Ludlow tried to stir his people into forming a militia against Dutch and Indian attacks. This ended up just stressing the people of Fairfield out, especially by the threat of Indian attacks. Furthermore, Ludlow himself was under suspicion by Connecticut and New Haven of trying to start his own independent colony. This chaos, along with famine conditions setting in, led to the perfect conditions for a witch trial.
One year previously, in 1651, Goodwife Bassett (Goodwife was a contemporary honorific for married women, Goody for short) was charged with witchcraft and hanged in nearby Stratford. The exact details of her case are unknown, but we do know that before her execution, she claimed that "there was another witch in Fairefield that held her head full high." With political tension at a boiling point and Ludlow in need of someone to blame, Goody Bassett's claim about a witch in Fairfield seemed like a good opportunity.
In 1653, An accusation of witchcraft was levelled against Goodwife Knapp. She was skin-searched for devil's marks and after close examination she was determined to have "witch's teats". Her fellow residents (including Mary Staples) then testified against her in a trial by jury. Not long after, Knapp was sentenced to hang. Roger Ludlow, who participated in this trial, was probably pleased by this result. Not just because it was ridding Fairfield of its troubles, but especially because it deflected blame away from him for causing it.
Although declared guilty, Goody Knapp would not confess to the crime, nor would she implicate others in Fairfield. She was subjected to interrogation after interrogation by several groups while awaiting her execution. Knapp was told that for the good of her soul she should reveal everything she knew about other witches, just like Goody Bassett did. In order to bait Knapp into implicating out of revenge, she was also told that Mary Staples's testimony in court was decisive in convicting her. But Goody Knapp stuck to her principles, and instead promised that on the gallows she would inform Ludlow of everything told to her in private. Someone told her that if she waited until she was at the gallows, the "Devill will have [her] quick" before she could reveal her secrets. Knapp retorted:

"Take heed the devil have not you, for she could not tell how soon she might be her companion. The truth is you would have me say that goodwife Staples is a witch, but I have sins enough to answer for already, and I hope I shall not add to my condemnation; I know nothing by goodwife Staples, and I hope she is an honest woman."

What happened next is unclear, but it seems that Knapp did let slip about an incident involving Mary Staples. She claimed that Staples was approached by an Indian man carrying two shiny objects "brighter than the light of day", which the man told her were "Indian gods". Knapp was initially unclear about whether Staples had accepted these gifts. It would have been damning for Mary Staples if she did accept them. When Thomas Staples, Mary's husband, visited her in prison to confront these rumours, Knapp vehemently claimed that Mary had refused the gifts.
At last, Goody Knapp was brought to the gallows. Along Knapp's journey from the prison, Mary Staples yelled to the crowd that Knapp was innocent, but she was shouted down. Just as Knapp promised, she whispered something into Roger Ludlow's ear before ascending the ladder. After the execution, Knapp's body was cut down to be carried to the grave, but things did not end there.
A crowd of women clamoured around the body in order to see Knapp's "witch's teats" for themselves. Among them was Mary Staples, who tumbled the corpse up and down, stripping away fabric to reveal bare skin. Seeing the alleged marks, Mary said something to this effect:

"If these be the markes of a witch I am one. "
or
"I have such markes."

The other women rebuked her, saying that no honest women have those marks. Mary eventually yielded control of the body, and Goody Knapp was carted away to her grave.
The story still doesn't end there. In a supposedly private conversation, Ludlow claimed that Goody Knapp had implicated Mary Staples as a witch in her final moments. As the rumour spread, any existing tension between Ludlow and the Staples soon exploded into an all-out feud. It is reported that Ludlow publicly called Mary Staples a liar, and when Mary asked for an example of a lie she told, Ludlow said that he didn't need to provide one since she lied constantly. It got so bad that they even argued in church.
To Ludlow, the assumption that Mary Staples was a witch was perfectly sound. She had been implicated by a proven witch, she had professed said witch's innocence, she was intemperate in church, she was prideful, and was a notorious liar. The Staples were worried that Ludlow would eventually try Mary as a witch, so they acted first.
In 1654, Thomas Staples accused Roger Ludlow of slandering his wife, accusing him of calling Mary a witch and a liar. Ludlow was out of the country at the time and could not testify in person, which did not help his case, and much of his written testimony was deemed untrustworthy. After listening to all the evidence pertaining to both Goody Knapp's trial and the Staples' accusations, the court made its decision and ruled favour of the Staples, forcing Ludlow to pay a fine.
Despite this victory, suspicions of witchcraft would follow Mary Staples for the rest of her life. She was even tried at Fairfield thirty eight years later in 1692, but this is out of the scope of this post. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, the Staples trial had ramifications which would extend much further into world history. Mary, having survived the accusations, would go on to have a daughter, Hannah, in 1659. It was this lineage that produced Sir Winston Churchill in 1874, making Mary Staples his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
As for Ludlow himself, the humiliation from both the Staples case and the Fairfield militia debacle was too much for him, and he left the colonies soon after. He moved to Dublin where he took up positions in councils and courts around the island before he died around 1664.
​
Lydia Gilbert
This case is probably the most bizarre out of all the trials, since the supposed witch was not even present for the crime which she was accused of.
In 1651, Windsor, during a militia drill, an accidental shooting occurred. A musket in the hands of a young Thomas Allyn misfired, killing 58-year-old Henry Stiles. Henry was the oldest brother of the Stiles family, one of the first parties to settle in Windsor. Thomas Allyn was the son of Mathew Allyn, a wealthy resident of Windsor. This accidental murder became a high-profile incident in the town.
Allyn was charged with "homicide by misadventure", for which he was fined £20 and had to post a bond of £10 to ensure his good behaviour for a year, which included a prohibition from bearing arms. Although the matter had been settled in court, the community would not forget this incident. 3 years later, it would be back in the public consciousness.
So where was Lydia Gilbert in all of this? It turns out that she and her husband, Thomas Gilbert, were living on the same land as Henry Stiles. Stiles was an employer of the Gilberts, and the two parties had joint ownership of the farmland. Lydia, it seems, did some of the housework for the aging Henry Stiles.
In 1654, Lydia Gilbert was accused of witchcraft.

"Lydia Gilbert thou art indicted... that not having the feare of God before thy eyes thou hast of late years, or still dost give entertainment to Sathan ... and by his helpe hast killed the body of Henry Styles, besides other witchcrafts for which... thou deservest to dye."

While the other charges of witchcraft are unknown, the charge that Lydia Gilbert was responsible for the death of Henry Stiles was probably the most damning. The court seemed to believe that Lydia, using powers granted by the devil, had caused Thomas Allyn's musket to misfire and kill Henry Stiles.
Lydia was found guilty and was sentenced to hang, the last witch in Windsor. Although no record of the execution exists, it was likely carried out since Thomas Gilbert sold his farm and moved to Wethersfield where he remarried shortly after. For his part, Thomas Allyn had his £20 fine refunded and he would eventually become a captain of the local militia.

1662 - 1663: The Hartford Witch Panic

Between 1655 and 1661, a few more witch trials occurred, but all of them ended with an acquittal, the reasons for which will be discussed later. This peace, however, would end abruptly in 1662 with eight witch trials in eight months. During this time, four witches were hanged and many of the accused fled. This was the climax of the Connecticut Witch Trials, and a prelude to the events at Salem in 1692.
Background
Things were not going well for the Puritans in the 1660s. Cromwell's protectorate in England had just fallen apart, making way for the ascension of Charles II. Charles had a bone to pick with the Puritans, especially those responsible for executing his father. Some of the regicides had managed to flee to New England in order to escape execution, so it was only a matter of time before the colonies had the king's attention.
There were fears that Charles may begin to exert his rule over New England, which had until this point enjoyed relative independence from the government in London. This tension was particularly high in Connecticut. The colony was, in practice, independent with their own constitution, the Fundamental Orders. However, the colony had never received a Royal Charter. Without this recognition by the crown, their colonial claim was technically illegal. So in 1661, Connecticut's governor, John Winthrop Jr. (son of John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts) set sail for England in the hopes of securing a charter for Connecticut. Until he came back, Connecticut's future was up in the air.
On a theological level, things were not going well either. Church membership had undergone a steady decline, partially due to strict requirements for church membership. Church members had to show evidence of godliness and commitment to the faith, and only those whose parents had been baptised could themselves be baptised. Throughout this time, debates about the Half-way Covenant (a form of partial membership) sprang up across New England. Proponents saw it as a way to continue the church's influence, while more conservative Puritans saw it as a violation of congregationalism and visible sainthood.
In Connecticut, the religious turmoil did not end there. In 1647, Hartford's co-founder and beloved Pastor, Reverend Thomas Hooker, had died from epidemic sickness, the same one that Alse Young may have been hanged for. His death left an open position for the Pastor of Hartford's church, whose role was to guide the congregation in the daily application of the Christian faith. Whoever wanted the job would have to contend with Reverend Samuel Stone, the Teacher of Hartford's church, whose responsibility was over church doctrine. Stone held a powerful position within the community. His actions such as converting Mary Johnson during her witch trial had also earned him a lot of respect.
In the early 1650s, a quarrel broke out in Hartford which threatened to split the church in two. The details of this are too complicated for this post, but the conflict really took off in 1653 when Samuel Stone withdrew the candidacy of his student, Michael Wigglesworth, for the role of Pastor. This prevented a vote by the congregation, infuriating many conservative Puritans. Despite being a moderate Puritan, Stone believed in the authority of the church and that his position as Teacher allowed him to control a whole manner of internal matters, including the candidacy of its leadership. A vocal minority, led by Ruling Elder William Goodwin, felt that Stone had betrayed the ideas of congregationalism upon which Hooker had founded Hartford.
This quarrel went on for several years, spilling over into the courts in Massachusetts. Many Puritan leaders saw the whole event as a disgrace, since religious strife was seen as an act of the devil. The quarrel ended in 1659 with the minority removing themselves from Hartford and settling in Hadley, Massachusetts. This took away many devoted members from Hartford's church, and Samuel Stone was left an embittered man.
Looking at the conditions in Hartford in 1662, it's unsurprising that things would quickly get out of hand. Religious turmoil, both past and ongoing, was fresh in everybody's minds. Combined with the uncertainty of the colony's political future, it was a time of great paranoia for Hartford. It would only take a spark to set it off, which eventually came in the form of a death and a possession.
​
Elizabeth Kelly
On March 23, 1662, 8-year-old Elizabeth Kelly returned home from the morning church service, accompanied by her neighbour, Judith Ayres. Judith Ayres and her husband, William Ayres, had somewhat of a mixed reputation. Although the Ayreses were rather wealthy landowners, they frequently got into trouble. William had been convicted of stealing multiple times, and both of them had posted multiple bonds to ensure their good behaviour. Additionally, Judith Ayres had to terminate her second child in order to save her life, the emotional trauma from which may explain the unusually close relationship between her and Elizabeth Kelly.
Once they arrived at the Kelly household, Goody Ayres served Elizabeth some broth from a pot hanging over the fire. John and Bethia Kelly, Elizabeth's parents, protested that the broth was too hot, but Elizabeth drank it all anyway. Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth immediately complained of stomach pains. John then gave Elizabeth powdered angelica root, an herb usually used to ward of witchcraft, which seemed to cure her pain. Later that afternoon, Elizabeth went back to town to attend the afternoon church service. She arrived home that evening without any complaints.
That night, while in bed next to her father, Elizabeth Kelly suddenly woke up and began to scream.

"Father! Father! Help me! Help me! Goodwife Ayres is upon me! She chokes me! She kneels on my belly. She will break my bowels. She will make me black and blue! Oh father! Will you not help me!"

John tried to calm Elizabeth down, but with little success. She continued again the morning after.

“Goody Ayres torments me! She pricks me with pins! She will kill me! Oh father, set on the great furnace and scald her! Get a broad axe and cut of her head. If you cannot get a broad axe, get the narrow and chop off her head!”

Word spread, and some of their neighbours came in to visit Elizabeth the next day, including Rebecca Greensmith and Goody Ayres. When Elizabeth saw Ayres, she asked "Why do you torment me and prick me?" Ayres sat next to Elizabeth and quietly told her that she would bring her a "lace to set upon her dressing" if she stopped speaking against her. Soon after, Elizabeth became calm and fell asleep.
That night, Elizabeth began to scream once more. This time, she did not stop. She cried out against Goody Ayres and asked her father to go to the magistrates to punish her. Elizabeth continued like this for another day and night, until she finally cried:

"Goodwife Ayres chokes me!"

Upon saying this, Elizabeth collapsed, dead.
​
The Beginning of the Hartford Trials
Upon Elizabeth's death, an investigation ensued. Its purpose was to find out if a supernatural crime had been committed. Judith Ayres was a prime suspect, and many people, including John Kelly, were set on proving her guilt.
This started with an examination of the corpse. A common test of witchcraft was to have the suspected witch touch the murdered corpse. If blood appeared where they touched, it was a sign they had killed them through witchcraft. When Goody Ayres was brought before the body, no blood was found wherever she touched. However, after Ayres had left, a great red spot appeared on Elizabeth's cheek next to where she had stood. This was good evidence, but more was needed.
Five days after Elizabeth's death, an autopsy was performed by Bray Rossiter, a physician from a neighbouring town. This was only the second autopsy ever performed in New England, and Rossiter himself seemed to have a rather limited understanding of corpses. The autopsy found that the body was "pliable, without stiffness or contraction", noting that "experience of dead bodies renders such symptoms unusual". It also found that areas of the flesh "had a deep blue tincture." With our modern understanding, we know that these "unusual" findings were the result of the cessation of rigor mortis and the pooling of blood due to gravity. Rossiter, however, took these as signs of an unnatural cause of death.
The trials began soon after, and both William and Judith Ayres were implicated. At the time, Increase Mather wrote that two people in Hartford, possibly the Ayreses, were given a trial by swimming, whereby the victim's hands and legs were tied together before being thrown into water. If the victim floated, it was a sign that they were a witch. When the Ayreses were given this test, they both floated to the surface "after the manner of a buoy." When a skeptical volunteer offered to jump in himself, he was found to sink. It seemed like their fates were sealed. But luckily for the Ayreses, the prison they were held in was not heavily guarded, and the couple were easily broken out by some friends. The Ayreses fled to Rhode Island, leaving almost everything behind, including two sons of 5 and 8 years old.
Unfortunately, this escape only escalated the hysteria in Hartford. Accusations began to fly across the town. Before long, there was another trial for witchcraft. Hartford residents, Mary and Andrew Sanford, were indicted for "familiarity with Satan". Details of the trial are unclear, including the names of the accusers, but we do know that the charges against them included fortune telling, an act that suggested contact with preternatural forces. Mary was found guilty and presumably hanged, while Andrew was acquitted and later moved to Milford where he remarried.
This was far from the end of the Hartford trials. Later that year, a new catalyst emerged which would accelerate the violence into a full-blown witch hunt.
​
Ann Cole
Ann Cole was the sixteen-year-old daughter of John Cole who, according to historian Richard Ross, was a “prominent member of the conservative Congregationalist minority in the Hartford Church and an enemy of Samuel Stone’s progressive policies.” Their family was beset by many troubles such as the ongoing controversy in the church, a lack of inheritance causing financial issues, and having two male family members who were lame. Additionally, the exodus of many conservative congregationalist church members to Hadley, Massachusetts had had a detrimental effect on Ann's marital prospects.
In the midst of the first trials in Hartford, Ann began having fits. This was promptly investigated by a team of ministers, led by Samuel Stone, possibly eager to prove himself still capable as a spiritual leader. Among them was Reverend John Whiting, who wrote an account of this event. Ann experienced "extremely violent bodily motions," speaking about how "a company of familiars of the evill one ... were contriving how to carry out mischievous designes, against some and especially against her." Whiting continues, "after some time of unintelligible mutterings, the discourse passed into a Dutch tone." Although a Dutch family was living in town, Reverend Stone declared that it was impossible for Ann to imitate a Dutch accent so accurately without being familiar with it herself.
During a "day of prayer" held specially for her, Ann was displayed publicly in the Wyllys mansion with two other afflicted women, who also began having fits. During this extraordinary assembly, Ann accused several residents in Hartford of witchcraft, including Rebecca Greensmith, whose subsequent actions would raise this story to dramatic new heights.
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The trial of Rebecca Greensmith
Rebecca, and her husband Nathaniel Greensmith, had very poor reputations in Hartford. Nathaniel was described as "a small wiry and quarrelsome man." He had accumulated a significant amount of property as a farmer, but also had constant run-ins with the law, being previously convicted on multiple counts of thievery, as well as assault and battery. Rebecca Greensmith was described by Whiting as "a lewd, ignorant, considerably aged woman." She was twice widowed, had extramarital relationships with other men, and was a heavy drinker. Before the two were married, Rebecca was afraid of Nathaniel having heard "so much of him." The marriage was almost certainly unhappy.
The timing of events in this next part are a bit fuzzy, and although I think I've got it right, I can't say so with full confidence. My sources can't agree on the timing either.
By the time Rebecca was accused by Ann Cole, she was already imprisoned "upon suspicion of witchcraft," as a result of the previous panic. Hartford had good reasons for suspecting Greensmith, since she had visited the home of Elizabeth Kelly during her illness, and she was friends with Goody Ayres. Both Rebecca and her husband were indicted and were made to attend the hearing.
During the proceedings, Nathaniel maintained his innocence. But shockingly, when Rebecca heard the accusations made against her by Ann Cole, she confessed her guilt on all charges, and more. Rebecca claimed that although she had not yet made a covenant with devil, she had promised to have several meetings with him, including a "merry meeting" at Christmas. Upon hearing this, the aging Reverend Samuel Stone, who was present in court, proclaimed the "exceeding heinousness and hazard of that dreadful sin," pointing out that the devil loved Christmas (the holiday was banned in the colonies). Nathaniel was allowed to go home, while Rebecca had to stay in prison. The court was to reconvene in a few weeks, and both of them had to attend.
As an aside, Farmington resident Mary Barnes was also indicted for witchcraft during this chaos along with her husband, Thomas, who would be acquitted. We know tragically little about Mary, despite her being the last witch executed in Connecticut. We do know that she was an illiterate servant, she was previously accused of adultery, and she was not a member of the Farmington church. Her unsavoury reputation probably helped the court reach their decision to convict.
Back in Hartford, Nathaniel Greensmith visited Rebecca in prison and tried to persuade her not to implicate him, even bringing up the wellbeing of her children. He allegedly said something to the effect of:

"Now thou hast confest against thyself, let me alone and say nothing of me, and I will be good unto thy children."

This attempt did not work. Instead, Rebecca doubled down and expanded her story. When Reverends Whiting and Haynes interviewed her in prison, she told them that the devil appeared to her as a deer or a fawn, and that she would meet him in the company of other witches and familiars who took the form of various creatures. She also claimed that "the devil had frequent use of her body with much seeming (but indeed horrible, hellish) delight to her."
Rebecca had thoroughly condemned herself, but that was not all. Possibly out of anger, or revenge, or "out of love to my husbands soule", she accused Nathaniel of being a witch. During the trial, Rebecca testified that her husband possessed unusual strength despite "being a man of little body and weake to my apprhension." She shared stories about familiars following him around, such as "a red creature" and "two creatures like dogs" which he said were foxes.
But Rebecca did not stop at testifying against her husband. She began implicating many others who had been mentioned in Ann Cole's mutterings:

"I also testify that, I being in the wood at a meeting, there was with me Goody [Elizabeth] Seager, Goodwife Sanford and Goodwife Ayres; and at another time there was a meeting under a tree in the green by our house, & there was there James Wakeley, Peter Grants wife, Goodwife Ayres & Henry Palmer's wife (Katherine) of Wethersfield, & Goody Seager, & there we danced, & had a bottle of sack. It was in the night, & something like a cat called me out to the meeting, & I was in Mr. Varlett's orchard with Mrs. Judith Varlett & she told me that she was much troubled with the Marshall Jonathan Gilbert, & cried & she said if it lay in her power she would do him a mischief, or what hurt she could."

For Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith, and Mary Barnes, no further investigation was needed. The three condemned witches were all hung on the same day in January 1663. They would be the last witches executed in Connecticut, and the last in New England until the events at Salem in 1692. But for those who Rebecca Greensmith had accused, this would not be the end of their ordeal.
​
Next Part

It was historically about the opposite (AKA keeping politics out of Christianity).
American secularism comes from the Puritans. In the 1600s, the church of England was under the rule of the King of England and was basically whatever the king wanted it to be. It wasn't really based on any specific theology it was more of a political tool, which angered many English protestants. While most Puritans wanted to "purify" the English church, the ones that settled in America gave up on the church and created their own church. The New England colonies were secular in that the civil authorities and church were separate, but their new church was so powerful and influential that New England was a theocracy in all but name.
The creation of the first amendment was mostly a check against a hypothetical "Church of America" that would corrupted by man's politics or prohibit others from practicing their religion their way. It specifically says "Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise". Christianity isn't an establishment of religion; that would be a specific church (like the Baptists, or the Methodists, or the Catholics, etc...) a specific organization with a specific theology. The founders wanted the government out of Christianity so that the churches had total freedom to do what they need to do.
But I don't see how the government going off of vaguely Christian principles is unconstitutional. Christianity is a religion, a belief system. The vast majority of America are and have always been Christian. Almost every single law we have is based on Christian principles, because Christians introduced and passed the law and their morality is Christianity.
Its really almost impossible to pass any law in America with this understanding of secularism. How could you pass any laws without legislating morality? The abolitionist movement was solely based off Christian morality and its most prominent leaders were "theocrats" and protestant ministers. Is MLK jr a theocrat when he, as a pastor, thinks that discrimination is immoral and should be banned?
Just my opinion. What do you think? Is it possible to pass laws as a Christian without there being any Christian influence? Does Christianity count as an "establishment of religion" despite there being thousands of different establishments with different practices and different theologies?
EDIT: Let me make it clear before this gets out of hand. Maybe you think religion shouldn't belong in politics anyway. I personally disagree but that's venturing out of the scope of my main point. I’m mainly addressing the people who say Christianity isn’t constitutionally allowed to have a voice in politics.