Rowan & Pine: A Feminist Folklore & Mythology Podcast - October 21, 2023


Pine Cones： Witches' Brooms ｜ Rowan & Pine Shorts

Episode Twenty-Three： Haunted Dolls - it's the WAAARREENNS Pine Cones： Friday the 13th｜ Rowan & Pine Shorts

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

130.57

Word count

1,151

Sentence count

52

Harmful content

Misogyny

12

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I cannot believe it.
00:00:02.720 You cannot!
00:00:03.700 Elizabeth, you bewildered him.
00:00:05.080 I cannot believe the devil may own a woman's soul, Mr. Hale, when she keeps an upright way as I have.
00:00:10.700 And if you believe I may do only good work in the world and yet be secretly bound to Satan, then I must tell you, sir, I do not believe it.
00:00:17.140 Then you do believe that there are...
00:00:18.560 If you think that I am...
00:00:20.260 I say that I am...
00:00:21.560 Oh!
00:00:30.000 the leaves are blowing in the trees there's a chill in the air the clouds partially obscure 1.00
00:00:37.380 the moon suddenly a crazed woman flies upon a broom through the sky above hair blowing freely 0.94
00:00:43.640 behind her as she cackles with evil glee where is she going who is she going with and most 1.00
00:00:50.020 importantly how is she flying before we dive deeper into the magic behind witches brooms 1.00
00:00:56.480 their flight, and how they achieved it. Let's cover some things first.
00:01:01.100 The word broom was derived from the word besom, which, in Scotland, meant an unclean or rude
00:01:07.260 woman or girl. We still largely associate these characteristics with witches today,
00:01:12.500 as well as the association between witches and their brooms.
00:01:17.060 The Witches' Sabbath is a nighttime gathering of witches where they practice witchcraft and
00:01:21.900 other rituals. In early modern times, women who were deemed to be witches were said to make salves
00:01:29.180 called flying ointments. These were said to be made from poisonous herbs and were rubbed on the 1.00
00:01:34.600 skin of witches to aid them in flight. Grab your capes, hats, and brooms and join us as we fly
00:01:41.620 deeper into the mythology behind witches and their broomsticks.
00:01:51.900 A man named Peter Waldo began preaching in Lyon in the late 1170s.
00:02:07.140 His followers, called Waldensians, adhered to vows of poverty and allowed preaching and
00:02:12.560 consecration of the sacrament by any layperson, which included women. The church saw this as a
00:02:18.460 threat and accused Waldensians of practicing witchcraft. The earliest depiction of women
00:02:26.580 riding broomsticks is an illustration alongside a poem titled Le Champion des Dames by Martin
00:02:32.360 Lefranc in 1451. The poem is in defense of righteous and moral women, but interrupted
00:02:38.740 briefly by talk of witches. In this illustration, the women's heads are covered, implying that they 0.92
00:02:44.340 Waldensians. It's theorized that the women are riding upon broomsticks because the broomstick
00:02:50.180 is a symbol of domesticity. But to have a woman riding a phallic broomstick is to imply the woman 0.99
00:02:56.100 is embracing her sexuality, thus femininity and domesticity gone wild. The aforementioned flying 0.81
00:03:04.120 ointments made with herbal or poisonous plants when rubbed upon their bodies would give them
00:03:08.600 the ability to fly with demons, devils and other witches out to the forest, mountains or near a 0.59
00:03:14.040 body of water to participate in their witch's Sabbath. These poisonous ointments were created 0.87
00:03:21.240 using herbs such as henbane, mandrake, hemlock, deadly nightshade, hellebore, and belladonna.
00:03:29.240 A Dutch physician named Johan Weyer said that women would apply the flying ointment to their
00:03:34.620 genitals, which produced, quote, a sensation of rising into the air and flying, end quote,
00:03:40.600 and that they would use the broomstick as a tool to apply the ointment.
00:03:46.640 A German writer and photographer named Gustav Schenk
00:03:50.020 took the herb Henbane and described his experience as such.
00:03:55.260 I experienced an intoxicating sensation of flying.
00:03:58.900 I soared where my hallucinations were swirling along.
00:04:02.720 This helps point to all imagery depicting witches flying.
00:04:05.820 in 1453 the first confession of broomstick riding was documented guillaume edelin a priest who
00:04:15.360 criticized the church's warning about witchcraft was soon arrested and tried for witchcraft
00:04:20.220 he was tortured until he finally admitted to practicing witchcraft and riding on a broom
00:04:25.400 he also said that he had seen his quote aged mother straddle a broomstick and whisk up the
00:04:31.440 chimney and out of the house. Antoine Rose, the witch of Savoy, confessed under torture that,
00:04:40.120 quote, the devil whose name was Robinette was a dark man who spoke in a hoarse voice.
00:04:46.320 Kissing Robinette's foot in homage, she renounced God and the Christian faith. He put his mark on
00:04:52.620 her, on the little finger of her left hand, and gave her a stick, 18 inches long, and a pot of
00:04:58.160 ointment. She used to smear the ointment on the stick, put it between her legs, and say,
00:05:03.860 Go! In the name of the devil, go!
00:05:12.260 People suspected of practicing witchcraft were often brutally tortured into confession.
00:05:17.700 This created a lot of false accounts on the practicing of witchcraft and what it entailed.
00:05:21.960 as the persecution of witches ramped up so did the claims of what witches were capable of
00:05:29.380 and what dark rituals they participated in in order to practice magic
00:05:33.120 claims began swirling around that witches would dig up the graves of deceased children
00:05:39.280 and use the fat as a means to blend the herbs and apply it to their skin
00:05:43.480 In 1428, Mattuccia di Francesco, an alleged Italian witch and nun known as the Witch of Ripa Bianca, 0.67
00:05:54.100 was reported to have said that witches' flying ointments contained bat blood,
00:05:58.180 vulture fat and the blood of a newborn baby.
00:06:01.380 Eight years following this, Johannes Snyder wrote in the Fumicarius that
00:06:05.440 boiled, unbaptised babies were the main ingredient.
00:06:08.300 The fears of women and their power, knowledge, and abilities by the church and society at large 1.00
00:06:18.400 created an environment filled with pointed fingers, gossip, and rumors about what women 1.00
00:06:23.400 were doing inside of their homes. If they were witches, they would not be able to fill 1.00
00:06:28.380 leadership roles within the church or society. Whether they ingested these herbs or applied
00:06:36.120 flying ointments to escape their dismal realities or to cope with distressing mental health disorders 0.98
00:06:41.380 is unknown to us whichever the reason being it's no wonder these women would want to venture off
00:06:49.020 into the night skies on broomsticks to arrive in a place with other women who felt the same
00:06:54.000 where they could dance celebrate chant and bond with those just like them
00:06:58.840 thank you for journeying with us through the night skies 1.00
00:07:08.160 put your broomsticks away for the night and fuck yeah folklore 1.00
00:07:28.840 smile 1.00
00:07:29.840 here we go
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