- yesterday
Documentary, The Witches (Complete Documentary)
Witches Documentary
Witches Documentary
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00The witch, evil sorceress, seductive enchantress, flying in the moonlight.
00:10What do we know of her mysterious origins?
00:13Who were the real women behind the myth of the witch?
00:19Who are these people with extraordinary supernatural powers?
00:23Where did they come from? And what do they do? Are they here now?
00:27These are questions the human community has been asking for a long time.
00:32It may be that the witches are a remnant of a long-lost goddess,
00:37a figure of incredible power who brought life and death.
00:42Why were witches tortured and burned at the stake during the Middle Ages?
00:48How did the belief begin that witches could fly?
00:55How did a child's game spark the tragedy of the Salem witch trials?
01:01And why, despite the witches' fearsome legacy,
01:04are thousands again practicing the ancient arts of witchcraft?
01:08Discover the enduring power and forbidden secrets,
01:11the myth and the magic of the witch on Ancient Mysteries.
01:17The witch, sorceress, enchantress, the devil's consort.
01:20The witch, sorceress, enchantress, the devil's consort.
01:22A fearsome being of fairy tale and myth,
01:29she has haunted the human consciousness for thousands of years.
01:32The witch, sorceress, enchantress, the devil's consort.
01:36The witch, sorceress, enchantress, the devil's consort.
01:43A fearsome being of fairy tale and myth,
01:45she has haunted the human consciousness for thousands of years.
01:48The witch remains a chilling specter that still captures the human imagination
01:52and baffles us with her mysteries.
01:55For psychologists, the witch definitely represents the dark side of the female presence.
02:09She is the shadow. She is the woman out of control.
02:14What is a witch?
02:18When did the belief in witches originate?
02:21Do they exist?
02:23Or are they merely bizarre creations of the human imagination?
02:32Over centuries, the image of the witch has undergone a strange transformation.
02:37In ancient Scandinavia, Freya, goddess of prophecy, soared through the heavens in a chariot.
02:55In Greek mythology, the witch was as beautiful as she was deadly.
03:00The sorceress Circe enchanted Ulysses' sailors with her magical brew of honey wine.
03:07Then, with a touch of her magic wand, she turned each man into a pig.
03:17Even earlier, in Hebrew tradition, a woman named Lilith, her long red hair streaming,
03:24slipped into unprotected homes, preying on newborns and stealing men's seed.
03:37Perhaps no figure in myth or legend has been so despised and feared as the witch.
03:46Being a witch was just about the worst thing you could be accused of being,
03:51because you practiced cannibalistic infanticide.
03:55You danced naked.
03:57You practiced promiscuous sex.
04:01You were part of the nightmare of society.
04:10The image of the witch is indelibly imprinted on the modern consciousness.
04:14And yet, in their earliest beginnings, magical female beings who possessed supernatural powers were not seen as a source of evil.
04:25Surprisingly, some scholars trace the origin of the witch back to ancient deities,
04:30who were as benign as they were powerful.
04:33Witches have been around as long as the human community has been trying to deal with disease and avert disaster.
04:43It may be that they developed from early goddess cults,
04:47that these are the women who serve the goddess.
04:50These goddess figures, some dating back 20,000 years,
05:04were revered for their magical ability to enhance fertility and nurture the land.
05:12All powerful creation deities, they held sway over the forces of the universe.
05:17For thousands of years, the creation goddess was honored as the all-powerful divine force.
05:28She was known by many names.
05:31In ancient Mesopotamia, she was called Inanna, the Queen of Heaven.
05:36In Egypt, the predominant civilization of the ancient world, she was known as Isis.
05:42In the land of Canaan, she was Asherah.
05:48All of them were supreme goddesses who presided over the sacred forces of life and death,
05:54worshipped by those who relied on the earth's fertility for their survival.
05:58People who depended on the earth for sustenance, on the cycles of nature, on the reproductive capacities of the earth to survive,
06:12and the association of those natural forces with the female body,
06:17and therefore the identification of the female as sacred, makes perfect sense.
06:21Not only did the ancients worship powerful female deities, but throughout the Middle East,
06:32often those who practiced the holiest of rituals were women.
06:36Could these priestesses, trained in the sacred arts, have been the earliest antecedents of the witch?
06:42Over the centuries, these ancient priestesses came to be known as the wise women.
06:52These women made house calls.
06:55They removed impurity, papratar.
06:58They took off sorcery, alwanzatar.
07:01They cured babies.
07:03They dealt with infertility.
07:05They had cures for impotence.
07:06And they even did sort of practical family therapy, because they would come to a house and cleanse it of evil words.
07:14From the early rituals sprang the sacred ceremonies, which would later be known as witchcraft.
07:21What magical powers did these so-called ancient wise women possess?
07:26Accounts from ancient Turkey describe how the wise women would sit inside a sacred circle drawn with salt
07:34to recite their magical incantations.
07:50Their ritual objects were simple.
07:53But they were believed to possess awesome powers of healing and protection.
07:57What's interesting about it is that they are so clearly understood to be positive figures in their society.
08:10No king could be without their counsel.
08:13No army could recover from a defeat without their ritual activities.
08:19No baby could be born without their presence.
08:23The question fascinates scholars.
08:27How did the benign image of the wise woman become transformed into the malevolent figure of the witch?
08:42Some scholars believe the answer may lie in events which took place three millennia before the birth of Christ.
08:48In this turbulent time, tribes of nomads known as the Indo-Europeans invaded the western world from the east.
08:59They were a warrior people who brought with them a strong belief in aggressive male gods of war.
09:06Over the centuries, the belief in their male sky gods would come to dominate the once mighty female earth deities.
09:14One of the things we see in the development of the history of religions is that very often goddesses start out in very prominent roles and are gradually demoted.
09:27We actually see their names moving down on the list that the scribes are copying over and over and over again.
09:32Some scholars believe that when the Hebrews, worshippers of one God, settled in the land of Canaan around 1300 before the Common Era, they perpetuated this male-dominated vision of their own creation story.
09:48Some believe that in the biblical story of creation, Eve is the mortal version of the earlier goddess Asherah.
10:01In the Garden of Eden, it is Eve who bears responsibility for the fall of all humanity.
10:06And the sacred tree and the snake, once benign symbols of the earlier goddess culture, become something both dangerous and forbidden.
10:20Obeying the laws of the Bible, the Hebrews condemned witchcraft as a pagan practice, banning it from the land of Canaan.
10:28Let no one be found among you who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft or consults the dead.
10:43Deuteronomy 19, 10.
10:46Strangely, despite this prohibition, one of the most mysterious stories in the Bible describes a magical encounter between a biblical king and a witch.
10:59This story is set in a period when King Saul is locked in a ferocious battle with the Israelites' formidable enemy, the Philistines.
11:08On the eve of the fateful battle of Gilboa, a troubled king Saul seeks out a forbidden sorceress, hoping that she may call up a spirit who can counsel him from beyond the grave.
11:22It's a fascinating story because Saul has already banished all the witches from the land.
11:28And yet, when push comes to shove, he's showing up at the local wise woman's house to get the true skinny on the upcoming battle.
11:35Then Saul said unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her and inquire of her.
11:46And his servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor.
11:541 Samuel 28, 7.
11:57King Saul visits the witch in the village of Endor on the outskirts of Nazareth.
12:06He asks her to summon the prophet Samuel from the dead so that he may receive Samuel's wisdom before the battle.
12:13The witch obeys the king's request.
12:15She digs a ritual pit, makes a little sacrifice, and sure enough, she brings up the ghost of Samuel the prophet from the land of the dead.
12:27Tragically, the ghost has only ominous news for the troubled king.
12:34The specter of Samuel predicts that Saul will die in battle.
12:39On the next day, Samuel's terrible prophecy of doom is fulfilled.
12:44Why does the Bible, while forbidding witchcraft, contain this enigmatic story of a revered Hebrew king visiting a witch in his time of need?
12:57It is an ancient mystery which remains unanswered.
13:00In the 14th century, all Europe was overrun by a mysterious plague known as the Black Death.
13:20As the scourge swept across the land, whole villages were decimated.
13:26In all of Europe, one in every three would perish.
13:33With the onset of the Black Death came hysteria, the fear that a great, inescapable evil had descended upon the land.
13:42With this fear came the belief that this misfortune was the work of the devil himself.
13:48Throughout Europe, the church established a tribunal known as the Inquisition to root out all religious heretics, feared as the dangerous accomplices of the devil.
14:07By the late 14th century, one form of heresy was judged to be especially malevolent.
14:11Witchcraft is defined as the most heinous of all forms of heresy because it is when you sell your soul to the devil and it puts not just the individual, not just the church at risk, it puts all of society at risk.
14:27Spawned by the growing panic, the image of the witch became magnified by the popular imagination into a terrifying reality.
14:40In the hysteria of the time, many believed that witches possessed the powers of flight.
14:47Surprisingly, as early as the 16th century, scholars suspected there might be a medical reason why those who practiced witchcraft believed they could fly.
14:56One German physician of the time, Johann Weyer suggested that the fantasies of flight were actually a result of witches anointing themselves with a hallucinogenic drug called Datura.
15:11As depicted in this early silent film, it was believed that witches flew to their dreaded nocturnal gatherings known as Sabbaths.
15:26The witch was believed to have made a face-to-face pact with the devil and the witch was believed to actually worship the devil in large nocturnal assemblies.
15:46And indeed, at these Sabbaths, to which they allegedly flew, there were various forms of immoral activity that was believed that there was promiscuous sex taking place at the Sabbath.
16:00So indeed, you have the image of a secret society that reverses all the moral norms of society.
16:11The Sabbath was believed to be a frenzy of naked dancing and gluttonous feasting on the flesh of human infants.
16:20It reached its climax with the appearance of Satan, the Prince of Darkness himself, who would have sexual intercourse with the assembled witches in an unbridled orgy.
16:30The imagery of the witch's Sabbath with its panoply of prohibited sexuality had a fascinating appeal to the people of that time.
16:44Especially when we consider that celibacy and control of sexual impulse has always been considered an appropriate expression of Christian behavior.
17:02In 1486, a book was written to assist the witch hunters in the grim task of identifying and prosecuting witches.
17:11The work was entitled The Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer Against Witches.
17:17Penned by two Dominican monks in Germany, Jacob Sprenger and Henrik Kramer, The Malleus expressed a prevailing belief of the time, that women were sexually vulnerable beings, easy prey for the devil.
17:34What else is a woman but a foe to friendship?
17:43They are evil, lecherous, vain and lustful.
17:48All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is, in women, insatiable.
17:55The Malleus Maleficarum.
17:57Although there had been witch hunting manuals before the printing of the Malleus Maleficarum, it was actually Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer who linked lust and the particular condition of women's bodies to demonology and witchcraft.
18:18It's very specific. I mean, it's incredibly detailed. How do you know witches? How do you target them? For example, you never begin asking someone, are you a witch? You ask them, when did you become a witch?
18:35For 200 years, the lurid descriptions in the Malleus would serve as a manual for zealous witch hunters.
18:42Ironically, this book of intolerance and persecution was, in its own time, second only to the Bible in popularity.
18:56The victims of the persecution that the Malleus helped to inspire were often the people who were doing the most to help their community.
19:04When villagers felt that they had been harmed magically, that they had been the victims of witchcraft, there was a natural tendency to suspect that women were the witches who had harmed them.
19:25And that probably is because women performed functions that were very, very closely associated with magic.
19:34And women were the cooks, women were the healers, women were the midwives.
19:41Most of the accused witches were older, widowed, or single.
19:46Many were adept in the use of herbs for healing.
19:48Ironically, these skills made them objects of suspicion.
19:53For if these women could heal with potions and herbs, could they not also do terrible harm as well?
20:03There are cases on record in which, for example, a midwife has been practicing, apparently, with great success for 15, 20, 30 years.
20:12Suddenly, she's accused of witchcraft, killing babies, at the behest of Satan.
20:20And out of the woodwork, there come people whom she has delivered babies with for a generation, who suddenly say, in fact, she's guilty.
20:34Why were friends and family members so quick to accuse the innocent of witchcraft?
20:39It is a question which baffles historians to this day.
20:44And still, the worst was yet to come.
20:50Fueled by intense fear and hatred, the flames of the Inquisition seemed unquenchable.
20:56Soon, thousands would be snared in the web of terror and betrayal.
21:01Once the accused witches were arrested, the true horror began.
21:09To be continued...
21:12By the end of the 1600s, throughout Europe, the witch-hunting hysteria had reached its peak.
21:30Thousands were arrested and brought before inquisitors for examination.
21:33Under the Inquisitor's brutal scrutiny, the accused witches were stripped and searched.
21:47Then they were prodded mercilessly with long needles to find the mark of the devil.
21:51For the Inquisitor, any suspicious wart, mole, or birthmark could be enough to condemn someone to death.
22:07Once evidence of witchcraft was found, a confession was required.
22:11For it was against the law to execute a witch without one.
22:14The practice of torture, which had been banned for centuries, was revived to extract them.
22:24Some of the most horrendous and in some ways sophisticated methods of torture that were developed, were developed during the Inquisition.
22:39Tortures that are really too horrific almost for us to imagine any human being surviving through.
22:46The whole phrase, the third degree, can be traced back to this medieval period of torture, that there were three degrees of torture.
22:56And that the third degree was the degree that killed the person being tortured.
23:01Instruments such as thumb screws, leg screws, head clamps, and the Iron Maiden were all designed to inflict unbearable pain.
23:24Incredibly, even under torture, the witch was viewed as highly dangerous.
23:28The Malleus Maleficarum warned the torturer never to look a witch in the eye for fear of her evil powers.
23:38Because if you look into her eyes, you might have compassion for her.
23:43And in the book it says this is her casting her spell on you.
23:49But what that means is there was no room left.
23:52No room left, no room left for the Inquisitor to have any compassion for the person that was being tortured.
24:02Under torture, most accused witches confessed to the most heinous of crimes.
24:09To avoid more suffering, they told their torturers what they thought they wanted to hear.
24:13In the hope of getting these people to confess to the fantasies that judges and inquisitors had developed and indeed had acquired from their reading,
24:32these people were subject to excruciating physical pain.
24:45And we do know that if the pain is severe enough,
24:51we will confess to almost anything that our inquisitors want us to confess to.
25:06To determine guilt or innocence, the English devised a method known as swimming the witch.
25:11If the accused floated, she was judged a witch and condemned to death.
25:21If she sank and drowned, she was judged innocent.
25:25Either way, the suspect was doomed.
25:30For thousands of others in Europe, however, death came by fire.
25:35But why this method of execution?
25:37Scholars believe it was thought that only when the witch's body had been reduced to ashes,
25:44would her evil sorcery truly be destroyed.
25:52On the fateful day, the condemned would be packed into a wagon
25:56and paraded through narrow cobblestone streets to the village square.
26:01There, the accused witch was bound to the stake.
26:08Records show that on a single day in one village square in Germany,
26:13139 alleged witches were burned to death.
26:17The town historian noted that the place of execution looked like a small wood from the number of stakes.
26:23For the 200 years known as the Burning Times, witch hunts erupted like sporadic wildfires across Europe.
26:38The worst persecution would take place in the rural villages of France and Germany.
26:43There, under interrogation and torture, suspects were forced to surrender the names of their neighbors.
26:53But why did the fury of the witch hunts escalate so rapidly?
26:57Who did you practice with? Who else is involved in your rituals?
27:04You torture someone enough, you will give what is wanted in order to end the torture.
27:11And if it means naming someone, then you name someone.
27:14But this begins an escalating circle, an ever widening circle.
27:20And eventually you would have dozens, maybe hundreds of people who would be named as a result of one or two women originally being identified as witches.
27:30Perhaps no town in the 16th century captured the horror of the Burning Times more shockingly than Würzburg, Germany.
27:43There, the overzealous magistrates decided that almost the entire town was possessed by the devil.
27:50They condemned 600 people to death, 19 were priests, 41 were children.
28:05There were towns, in Germany in particular, where there were no women left after the inquisitors came through.
28:18Everyone was killed.
28:20When the fires of the Burning Times had finally smoldered into ashes, thousands had perished.
28:33Exactly how many actually died will perhaps always remain a mystery.
28:38Scholars estimates range from 60,000 to 300,000 victims.
28:43Although the fires of the Burning Times in Europe started to die out by the late 1600s, the witch-hunting frenzy would spread to the New World.
28:56In the strange and terrible history of the witch, perhaps no incident is more startling or more hotly debated than an event which took place in an obscure village in Massachusetts.
29:09A phenomenon which still haunts scholars with unanswered questions.
29:26During the Salem witch trials of 1692, in a few terror-filled months, nearly 200 people would be condemned as witches.
29:37Fourteen women and five men would be hanged on Salem's Gallows Hill.
29:42How did the witch-hunt of 1692 begin?
29:46And why here?
29:51The settlement of Salem was named after the holy city of Jerusalem.
29:57But here, the Puritans had found no land of milk and honey.
30:05Salem had endured 20 years of Indian wars.
30:09It was wracked by internal pressures, land disputes, and deep religious divisions tore at the struggling community.
30:17Though the Puritans clung to their strict religion, it offered little comfort.
30:28Eternal damnation was an ever-present threat.
30:32And the world of demons seemed as real as the hard New England soil.
30:37People living in the 17th century tended to believe that most things could be explained supernaturally.
30:51If you stumped your toe, or if your cow fell sick, or if your food went rotten before it should have done,
30:58there must surely be some kind of supernatural explanation for this.
31:02Ironically, scholars believe that the witch hysteria of 1692 began in the home of a Puritan minister, the Reverend Samuel Parris.
31:18Even more surprisingly, the event which sparked the ensuing terror was a child's game.
31:24It started when the Reverend Parris' daughter, Elizabeth, and his niece, Abigail Williams, were playing a game with the household slave, Tituba.
31:37They had been using a primitive crystal ball.
31:41This consisted of a glass of water with a raw egg broken into it.
31:46And then they would gaze into it, ask a question, and hope that images would come out or appear in the water.
31:55Well, at one of these experiments, one of the girls believed that instead of seeing the features of a wealthy, attractive future husband, she saw instead a coffin.
32:06Besieged by apparitions of death, the girls were soon thrown into convulsions.
32:14Within days, nine other girls in Salem were simultaneously stricken with the same mysterious affliction.
32:25Under pressure from the Reverend Parris, the girls revealed the names of three witches whom they said had caused their possession.
32:32Tituba, the household slave, Sarah Good, a poor beggar woman, and Sarah Osborne, a widow rumored to have had an illicit affair with one of her servants.
32:46All three were outsiders in the community, easy targets for suspicion.
32:52What motivated the girls to make their astonishing accusations?
32:58What was the source of their possession?
33:03There are two possible explanations of the girls' fits at Salem.
33:09One is that they were experiencing some kind of psychological malady, that they were hysterical in one way or another.
33:19The other explanation is that they were being deliberately deceptive, that they were practicing some kind of fraud.
33:26It may have been, at least on the part of the young girls who claimed to be bewitched, a real form of social release.
33:37They were so tightly controlled, and their status in patriarchal Puritan households was so marginal, that this was a way of becoming the center of attention.
33:45Although it might seem incredible in modern times, the accusations made by the possessed girls in Salem were taken seriously by the local authorities.
33:56They set up a tribunal to investigate the charges.
34:03What compelled the local magistrates to convene these extraordinary trials?
34:09Surprisingly, some scholars believe that the trials may have concealed a political agenda.
34:14One common explanation has been that the parents and relatives of the girls used the accusations as a way to attack their enemies.
34:27And it's extremely striking that most of the accusers came from one side of the factional dispute and most of the accused from the other side.
34:38Sparked by the Salem trials, the hysteria spread to 24 outlying villages.
34:48By September 1692, the jails overflowed with nearly 200 accused witches.
34:5527 were found guilty, and 19 were hanged.
34:58After execution, their bodies, forbidden a proper Christian burial, were left to rot in the open air on Salem's Gallows Hill.
35:13Why did the witch trials finally end?
35:18Some scholars believe the trials ended quickly because the witch hunters accused one victim too many,
35:24the wife of the governor of Massachusetts.
35:30With the power structure of New England seemingly threatened,
35:34the leaders saw to it that the trials were abruptly stopped.
35:41What ultimately brought the terrors of the burning times in the old and new world to an end?
35:47It remains an intriguing mystery.
35:49Some scholars believe that the advent of science may be a decisive factor.
35:58The witchcraft trials come to an end for many reasons,
36:03but I think a large part of the reason was that society moved away from its fear of the supernatural and the unexplainable.
36:14You curse your neighbor's cow, and the cow dies the next day, and suddenly you're a witch.
36:20Well, as different explanations for why the cow bloated up and died become available,
36:27the identification of witchcraft as a source of all evil in society will begin to diminish,
36:34and it eventually will disappear.
36:37And yet, strangely, despite the growth of science, the belief in witchcraft was far from over.
36:46Over hundreds of years, with the rise of science, the fearsome image of the witch gradually faded.
36:53By the early 20th century, the dreaded sorceress was reduced to the outrageous Halloween witch of popular culture.
37:11Yet surprisingly, in our own time, there has been a dramatic rebirth of the ancient arts of witchcraft.
37:29An estimated 200,000 men and women in the United States and Europe have dedicated themselves to following the ancient path of a witch.
37:43After so many centuries of persecution, why would anyone choose to be called a witch?
37:51Through the centuries, there have been so many misconceptions about witches.
37:58The green-faced, warded hag that wears the conical hat, the night flyer, the sorceress or sorcerer who works as the devil's consort.
38:10There are many negative connotations and myths about witches, but I will assure you that all are very untrue.
38:18What sparked the modern revival of ancient witchcraft?
38:23Scholars have traced its rebirth back to the astonishing work of a young British archaeologist named Margaret Murray.
38:34In her controversial book, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, published in 1921, Murray presented a startling theory.
38:43She insisted that in European history, witchcraft had not been an obscure cult, but a dominant religious force.
38:52She argued that the witches who were prosecuted in the 15th and 16th and 17th centuries were actually the practitioners of a pagan religion,
39:10which she claimed was the main popular religion throughout Europe.
39:18Murray's romantic vision of a powerful cult of witches was soon discredited by historians.
39:25But her popular book sparked a renewed fascination with witchcraft.
39:29By the mid-20th century, modern witchcraft had become the spiritual path for thousands of believers.
39:37They called their religion, Wicca, from an ancient Anglo-Saxon word meaning, craft of the wise.
39:44Inspired by these early origins, modern witches rely on the simplest of ritual elements, candles, herbs, incense and crystals, which they believe can be imbued with magical power.
40:00But how might these powers work?
40:03When we harness the forces of nature, in essence what we're doing is kind of like a very directed, powerful sending of a prayer.
40:21Of all the rituals of contemporary witchcraft, the sabbath is perhaps the most important.
40:30Powers of the west, powers of the waters, be here now!
40:34The modern witch's sabbath is in no way connected to the dreaded sabbath of the burning times.
40:41There is no pact with the devil.
40:45Instead, the roots of this modern sabbath can be traced back to much earlier traditions.
40:51The pagan rituals that marked the earth's changing seasons.
40:58This mid-summer night sabbath is traditionally observed on the shortest night of the year.
41:03In the hills above Los Angeles, these witches come together to celebrate the season.
41:13For a witch, the divine is not separate from the world.
41:19This is the plane of the sacred.
41:23There isn't some place else to go.
41:25We are not on some linear course that ends in some judgment.
41:28We are in an ever-continuing, ever-changing circle.
41:35How do modern witches use their magical powers?
41:39Claiming their ancient heritage, the followers of Wicca seek to live by a code of conduct
41:45summed up in a single age-old phrase,
41:48Do what you will, but harm none.
41:52When you become a witch, the first thing you learn about this natural power of the universe,
41:56which is all around us, and that we use all the time,
42:01every single member of the human race uses it,
42:04is that it hurts.
42:06You can burn your fingers with it.
42:08Therefore, you use it wisely.
42:11You use it in a positive sense.
42:12I think modern people, at least for most of this century, probably didn't believe in witchcraft,
42:18because we now live in a mechanistic world.
42:22Matter is dead for us.
42:24It is something to be exploited.
42:25It is not imbued with magical powers.
42:26I think, though, that we are beginning to shift from that old Newtonian universe,
42:28through Einstein's universe of infinite possibilities,
42:29into a postmodern world,
42:30where we powerfully understand the effects of the human race,
42:33and that we are beginning to shift from that old Newtonian universe,
42:36through Einstein's universe of infinite possibilities,
42:38into a postmodern world, where we powerfully understand the effects of the human race.
42:39the effect of random events, and the effect of the observer.
42:40The human race is dead for us.
42:42It is something to be exploited.
42:43It is not imbued with magical powers.
42:45I think, though, that we are beginning to shift from that old Newtonian universe,
42:50through Einstein's universe of infinite possibilities,
42:54into a postmodern world, where we powerfully understand the effect of random events,
43:01and the effect of the observer.
43:09After enduring centuries of misunderstanding,
43:13the witch has once again returned to reclaim her ancient heritage,
43:17one that for generations was branded as evil,
43:21but which scholars believe was, in fact, a legacy of ancient wisdom.
43:31In our own time, Wicca, the spiritual path of the witch,
43:35is recognized as an official religion.
43:39And, like other religions, it is imbued with a faith in divine powers,
43:43with a profound respect for the forces of nature,
43:46and a love of humanity.
43:48Like all quests of the spirit,
43:51it is one rich with magical possibilities.
Recommended
44:15
|
Up next
59:00
59:15
43:59
2:13
1:18
1:22
1:00
5:54