Word: witches
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Madame calmly notes one culprit's end: "She was burned at the stake yesterday, not Wednesday, as I had told you . . ." The woman who had been burned as a witch, La Voisin by name, was no innocent victim but a notorious poisoner and promoter of Black Masses. She symbolized the strange, diabolic resistance movement that flourished beneath the surface of official society, just as Madame de Sévigné symbolized the outer serenity and almost Japanese exactitude of social forms. There is no evidence that her 17th century mind understood that underground passion for evil any more than...
Ever-rabid in its denunciation of Senator McCarthy's witch hunts, the Americans for Democratic Action has recently assumed its own air of inquisitorial self-righteousness. Last week the national headquarters intervened to prevent Alger Hiss from speaking at the Swarthmore chapter of the ADA. Since the national organization gave no other grounds for its authoritarian behavior, its action obviously represents an attempt to raise a facade of political respectability...
Hanging is an old Anglo-Saxon custom. In the 13th century, punishment by death, in forms varying from the headsman's ax to the witch's pyre, was imposed as a deterrent for virtually every crime on the books. More than five centuries later, there were still some 200 crimes (including poaching) punishable by death in England. Children as young as seven were hanged. The first sweeping move toward clemency was not made until 1835, when these 200 mortal crimes were cut to four -high treason, murder, piracy, and setting fire to the royal dockyards and arsenals...
...question was a burly Zulu named Elifasi Msomi. A young witch doctor who was not doing very well at his trade, he went to another witch doctor for advice, and there, he said, he found Tikoloshe masquerading as the man's son. "You will go with this son of mine," said the elder doctor, "and get me the blood of 15 people to help my chemist shop. First I want the blood of a girl...
...period, Braden denied that he had ever been a member of the Communist party, and rejected the implication that the bombing had been part of a "Communist plot" to exploit the segregation issue. Law enforcement agencies in Louisville, he said, attempted to "cover up the bombing by instituting a witch-hunt...