Word: witches
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...goblin, must inevitable be slowed by a principle of limits. The field of free inquiry, then, must by its nature oppose a mentality which presumes to pass on a man's right to an education in accordance with its whims about his "company." Plainly, the danger of the unchallenged witch hunt is that it can quite conceivably begin defining as ineligible Communist soreheads all students it considers in any way "difficult"--from pacifists to students who support a larger allotment, or who simply protest energetically the allocation of Yale game tickets. Possibly the most pathetic figure of this situation would...
Thus spake the 17th Century's Isobel Gowdie, a Scots peasant who confessed her practices as a witch in language as fanciful as one of her great contemporaries, Poet Robert Herrick. Isobel (whom the authorities first hanged, then burned for safe measure) is one of the highlights of Christina Hole's scholarly, sober history of English witchcraft.* Her familiarity with it began when her old nurse destroyed her milk teeth as fast as they fell out, to keep them from evil hands...
...Hole explains, were in essence Christian England's last, fading traces of pagan religion, stemming from the same roots as the animal sacrifices of the Greeks and the fertility rites of the Egyptians. When King Saul found himself out of favor with his Maker, he turned to the Witch of Endor for advice and succor-and for centuries after King Saul, kings, scholars and peasants alike turned the same way for the same reason. Witches might be good or bad (i.e., they might practice white or black magic, or a mixture of both), but it never occurred even...
...Witch in Time. Sharp practices, thefts, murders were often promptly confessed by the evildoer when he heard that the local white witch was on his trail. It was this popular, pagan confidence in witchcraft that caused the Church to fear it like the Devil himself. On the European continent, a steady procession of harmless men, women and children went to terrible deaths as witches. In England, where religious problems were less acute, and the authorities considered witchcraft more a criminal offense than a heresy, the record was not so dark. Torture, to extract confessions, was rarely employed, and Author Hole...
...uncurtain as to how to begin this letter. My name you probley see from the heading. I am now a student at Ohio State University. I have changed a little sence you last contacted me. . . . I have played halfback on the Ohio State team in 1944, witch won the national championship, witch you probley remmember. And I also played in the East-West game. . . . I am intersed in coming to your university, this of course if you are intersed in my comming down there. . . . Sence coming out of the Army the cost of living here in Columbus; Ohio has gone...