Osculum infame is the name of a witch's supposed ritual greeting upon meeting with the Devil. The name means the 'shameful kiss' or 'kiss of shame', since it involved kissing the devil's anus, his "other" mouth. According to folklore, it was this kiss that allowed the Devil to seduce women...
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Sweden 🇸🇪🇩🇰The film Häxan, was produced in Sweden in 1922, but was directed by Benjamin Christensen from Denmark. It’s a kind of hybrid film, neither a purely documentary nor a fiction.
😅Don’t get my criticism wrong, I like the movie, I found it funny and ❤️chapter IV
In the early modern times ( not the Middle Ages) the folk healing (with magic- not herbs) led to many prosecutions and some of the convicted have wanted to do magic that harms others. However in the Sabbath-related processes there were chain reactions that caused the deaths of the children, women and men. The problems were deep in the communities and in the ways of those in power to solve these problems. Not so much in the Catholic Church, as the movie suggests.
The director has taken on a rather ambitious task. 🕵️♂️He spent years gathering sources on sorcery and religion to form the narrative background.🎥 The movie is really entertaining. It is not a historical document. Christensen manages to create a nice imagery, but it mostly reflects the book Malleus Maleficarum.
⚗️As social anthropologist Baxtrom & medical anthropologist Mayers (2016) have stated, Christensen tries to demonstrate the connections between witch trials & certain abnormalities of the human psyche. He draws from the neurological writings of Charcot. 🧬
🎞This is a cultural lecture in moving pictures. He animates happenings to life in the screen to point out ”nonsense”. His main point is that mass hysteria and cases of demonization are nowadays explained as diseases and disorders.⚕️
👩🏻🎓As Lappalainen (2018) has stated, it can be deduced from the historical documents that some of the accused witches were very fragile: beggars, intellectually disabled, sick and often alcoholics in Sweden-Finland.🍺
🤴🏻But the film is both elitist and ethnocentric by today's standards: Science has conquered the Dark Ages🧐 Rationalism was typical in the 1920’s explanations of the age of witch trials.
Suddenly in the end the focus is in young women and torture.
According to Doty & Ingham (Tortolani 2020), it’s fascination with distinct, historical time periods, and directors subsequent errors in conflating them throughout his narrative are, in large part, a residue of the pop-psychology of the era.
🏥On the other hand, the director did not notice from his time that eugenics was rising, especially in Sweden, and there was a desire to get rid of the mentally ill. The spa scene of an upscale woman does not match the mental hospital conditions of that time. Eugenics led to sterilizations and institutionalization of deviants. Certain groups of people began to be considered inferior, etc.
So basically the director does not see, that he is living inside the same problem what he tries to explain. Totalitarian institute offers the Rationale but at the same time it represents total control.
Reductionist interpretations for the witch trials were rife in the 20th century. Such explanations as ergot poisoning, mass hysteria, the rise of capitalism, and a misogynistic crusade have since been dismissed as overly simplistic, yet they remain pervasive in popular understandings of witchcraft. (Imogenknox 2021.)
The final word SLUT is The End in Swedish🙂
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