Halloween Witch - How we came to be seen

I was emailed this from a group I subscribe to here in NYC. Unfortunately, I do not know the author who wrote it (I wish I did) so I cannot give credit to anyone. However, I personally found it touching (especially during this time of year), and thought that maybe some of you might find it as touching as well.

The poem reflects on the times when witches were persecuted, tortured, and burned at the stake due to the incorrect belief that witches worshipped the Devil. So this Halloween, when you see the "traditional" witch being portrayed in advertisements or the such, just remember this story, and why we are portrayed that way.

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Halloween Witch

Each year they parade her about, the traditional Halloween Witch.
Misshapen green face, stringy scraps of hair, a toothless mouth beneath her
deformed nose. Gnarled knobby fingers twisted into a claw protracting from a
bent and twisted torso that lurches about on wobbly legs. Most think this
abject image to be the creation of a prejudiced mind or merely a Halloween
caricature. I disagree, I believe this to be how Witches were really seen.

Consider that most Witches were women, were abducted in the night, and
smuggled into dungeons or prisons under the secrecy of darkness to be
presented by light of day as a confessed Witch. Few if any saw a frightened normal looking woman being dragged into a secret room filled with instruments of torture, to be questioned until she confessed to anything suggested to her and to give names or what ever would stop the questions.

Crowds saw the aberration denounced to the world as a self-proclaimed Witch. As the Witch was paraded through town en route to be burned, hanged, drowned, stoned or disposed of in various other forms of Christian love all created to free and save her soul from her depraved body, the jeering crowds viewed the results of hours of torture. The face bruised and broken by countless blows bore a hue of sickly green. The once warm and loving smile gone replaced by a grimace of broken teeth and torn gums that leers beneath a battered disfigured nose. The disheveled hair conceals bleeding gaps of torn scalp from whence cruel hands had torn away the lovely tresses. Broken twisted hands clutched the wagon for support, fractured fingers with nails torn away locked like groping claws to steady her broken body. All semblance of humanity gone this was truly a demon, a bride of Satan, a Witch.

)O( )O( )O( )O( )O( )O( )O( )O( )O(

I revere this Halloween Crone and hold her sacred above all.
I honor her courage and listen to her warnings of the dark side of man.
Each year I shed tears of respect when the mundane exhibit their symbol of
Christian love.
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Blessed Be!