All about the Damned

In today's society the strange are not very accepted, and often complain about it despite the fact that the worst they get are stares and maybe an otherwise avoidable traffic ticket or two. I personally find it ridiculous, because these people choose to be different unlike people with the misfortune of being born with deformities, just like I've chosen, but refuse to accept the consequences of their decision. It is for this reason that I've decided to post about people who chose to be different back in the old days, and sometimes were just accused of being different, and the price they had to pay in the end. Maybe this will shut those emo kids up for a while...

Accused witches

Witches and those like them have been around sense the dawn of time, though it was only during the introduction of Judo-Christianity that they were deemed evil and spawns of Satan. According to recorded history it became a common practice around the early 1400's. It is unfortunate that the gospel itself brought them no harm, but as it always goes when you present a complicated idea to a mass of stupid people something always goes horribly wrong.

The people targeted with the accusation of witchcraft were on occasion practitioners or unrelenting pagans, but far more often than not they were just the mentally ill, the misunderstood or the poor. What is currently known as schizophrenia was first viewed as prophetic ability, whereas the person could converse with spirits and the deceased. Upon the introduction of Christianity, they were believed to hold the power of Discernia, which is the ability to detect and communicate with angels or demons, and sometimes both. Over time, as often happens with oral tradition and old works of religious documentation, Discernia was somehow either forgotten or scewed into the belief that these people were possessed by demons. The sufferers were first taken to a holy man for exorcism either once or a few times, depending on the importance or wealth of the person, and when this yielded no results the individual was either run off from the village or killed.

The impoverished rarely followed the common etiquette of the towns people, and this was generally because they couldn't afford to. The women couldn't by the clothes to cover themselves, had little opportunity to properly wash, and in desperate times even engaged in prostitution in a last effort to feed themselves. It is for these reasons that when it came to the poor the women were almost always the ones accused. Methods for doing away with accused witches of all kinds include the following:

• Throwing them into the river: If they floated they were witches and were burned at the stake and if they sank they were dead anyway from drowning. The conviction in the case of witchcraft was almost always the death penalty as well.


• Burning: Either at the stake or thrown onto a pile, this was a popular method. Many believed destroying the body in this manner eliminated the possibility for them to return from the dead. Also, when burned on a pile the towns people would often throw their belongings into the pile with them, in a effort to rid themselves of potentially cursed items.


• Stoning: Back in the ancient days a stoning would involve throwing rocks at someone until someone made a fatal blow. However, by the time the witch hunts began the people would just assume dig a shallow hole in the ground and pile rocks on top of the unfortunate victim. This led to the crushing of the ribcage and eventual suffocation.

The Left-handed

According to statistics today, only 3 out of every 100 people are left-handed. Scientists believe it is not hereditary, but I am left-handed and so is my father so the odds are against them on that one. Once considered little more than an interesting trait, the left-handed were eventually considered children of the devil somewhere through the course of history, and were treated as such. The term left is actually Latin for sinister, which tells you for just how long the left side has been associated with the evil and just plain bad. In the early middle ages children were beaten and sometimes killed for using their left hand. Believe it or not, left-handed children were being encouraged and even forced to use their right hand as recently as fifty years ago. I personally knew an old woman who told me herself that as a child in school they would tie her left hand to her desk so she was forced to write with her right one. She was ambidextrous as a result.

The Deformed

In today's society those burdened with deformities suffer the incessant gawking of the public every time they have to go out on common endeavors that we participate in without incident every day. Believe it or not, it has been worse. Back in the fifties was around the time the government started to help the deformed rather than just hide them, by offering funded income and medical insurance to aid them in any complications they might face due to their illness. However, as recently as the early 1700s infants born deformed were severely neglected and often left to die. Further before that almost every culture would abandon them entirely and races like the Vikings would actually leave a sick infant naked in the snow over night. If the child survived it was allowed to live. If not, well, you get the idea.

To those lost to the ignorance and unsettling violence innate to human beings, I'd like say something you've been needing to hear for all of these years: We miss you, we love you, and on behalf of mankind - we are sorry. And for those of us both chastised and chastising, the moral of the story is stop complaining - It could always be worse.