Looking rough…
Painting: Witches Sabbath by Francisco GOYA
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-cult_hypothesis
Moar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianic_Wicca
W.I.T.C.H.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_International_Terrorist_Conspiracy_from_Hell
>Painting: Witches Sabbath by Francisco GOYA
>source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-cult_hypothesis
>Moar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianic_Wicca
>W.I.T.C.H.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_International_Terrorist_Conspiracy_from_Hell
The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory that proposes that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pre-Christian, pagan religion that had survived the Christianisation of Europe. According to its proponents, the witch cult revolved around the worship of a Horned God of fertility, the underworld, the hunt and the hunted, whose Christian persecutors referred to him as the Devil, and whose followers participated in nocturnal rites at the witches' Sabbath.
The theory was pioneered by two German scholars, Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franz Josef Mone, in the early nineteenth century, and was adopted by the French historian Jules Michelet, the American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the American folklorist Charles Leland later in that century. The hypothesis received its most prominent exposition when it was adopted by a British Egyptologist, Margaret Murray, who presented her version of it in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), before further expounding it in books such as The God of the Witches (1931) and in her contribution to the Encyclopædia Britannica. Although the "Murrayite theory" proved popular among sectors of academia and the general public in the early and mid-twentieth century, it was never accepted by specialists in the Early Modern witch trials, who publicly discredited it through in-depth research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s.
Specialists in Europe's Early Modern witchcraft beliefs view the pagan witch-cult theory as pseudohistorical. There is an academic consensus among experts that those accused and executed as witches during the period were not followers of any witch religion, whether pre-Christian or Satanic in nature. Critics highlight that the theory rested on a highly selective use of the evidence from the trials, thereby heavily misrepresenting the events and the actions of both the accused and their accusers. Further, they point out that it relied on the erroneous assumption that the claims made by accused witches were truthful, and not distorted by coercion and torture. They also note that, despite claims that the witch cult was a pre-Christian survival, there is no evidence of such a pagan witch cult throughout the intervening Middle Ages.
The witch-cult hypothesis influenced literature, being adapted into fictional forms in works by John Buchan, Robert Graves and others. It greatly affected the origins of Wicca, a contemporary Pagan new religious movement that emerged in mid-twentieth-century Britain, claiming to be the survival of the pagan witch-cult. Since the 1960s, Carlo Ginzburg and other scholars have argued that surviving elements of pre-Christian religion in European folk culture influenced the Early Modern stereotypes of witchcraft, but scholars still debate how this may relate, if at all, to the Murrayite witch-cult hypothesis.
Court Painter…aka royal propagandist
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (/ˈɡɔɪə/; Spanish: [fɾanˈθisko xoˈse ðe ˈɣoʝa i luˈθjentes]; 30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his long career was a commentator and chronicler of his era. Immensely successful in his lifetime, Goya is often referred to as both the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. He was also one of the great portraitists of his time.[1]
Goya was born to a lower-middle-class family in 1746, in Fuendetodos in Aragon. He studied painting from age 14 under José Luzán y Martinez and moved to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs. He married Josefa Bayeu in 1773; their life was characterised by an almost constant series of pregnancies and miscarriages, and only one child, a son, survived into adulthood. Goya became a court painter to the Spanish Crown in 1786 and this early portion of his career is marked by portraits of the Spanish aristocracy and royalty, and Rococo style tapestry cartoons designed for the royal palace.
He was guarded, and although letters and writings survive, little is known about his thoughts. He suffered a severe and undiagnosed illness in 1793 which left him deaf, after which his work became progressively darker and pessimistic. His later easel and mural paintings, prints and drawings appear to reflect a bleak outlook on personal, social and political levels, and contrast with his social climbing. He was appointed Director of the Royal Academy in 1795, the year Manuel Godoy made an unfavorable treaty with France. In 1799, Goya became Primer Pintor de Cámara (Prime Court Painter), the highest rank for a Spanish court painter. In the late 1790s, commissioned by Godoy, he completed his La maja desnuda, a remarkably daring nude for the time and clearly indebted to Diego Velázquez. In 1800–01 he painted Charles IV of Spain and His Family, also influenced by Velázquez.
In 1807, Napoleon led the French army into the Peninsular War against Spain. Goya remained in Madrid during the war, which seems to have affected him deeply. Although he did not speak his thoughts in public, they can be inferred from his Disasters of War series of prints (although published 35 years after his death) and his 1814 paintings The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808. Other works from his mid-period include the Caprichos and Los Disparates etching series, and a wide variety of paintings concerned with insanity, mental asylums, witches, fantastical creatures and religious and political corruption, all of which suggest that he feared for both his country's fate and his own mental and physical health.
His late period culminates with the Black Paintings of 1819–1823, applied on oil on the plaster walls of his house the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man) where, disillusioned by political and social developments in Spain he lived in near isolation. Goya eventually abandoned Spain in 1824 to retire to the French city of Bordeaux, accompanied by his much younger maid and companion, Leocadia Weiss, who may or may not have been his lover. There he completed his La Tauromaquia series and a number of other, major, canvases.
Following a stroke which left him paralyzed on his right side, and suffering failing eyesight and poor access to painting materials, he died and was buried on 16 April 1828 aged 82. His body was later re-interred in the Real Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid. Famously, the skull was missing, a detail the Spanish consul immediately communicated to his superiors in Madrid, who wired back, "Send Goya, with or without head."[2]