Between the 14th and 18th centuries, somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 people on the European continent were tried and executed for witchcraft. Most of these people were burned alive in the public square of the nearest town, and most were also tortured before burning. Between 70% and 80% of all “witches” executed were women, but many men, children, and even animals were executed as well.

What is most strange about the witchcraft trials of medieval Europe is that, despite being studied in great detail by historians and scholars of many stripes and biases, no single persuasive explanation has emerged for why they took place.

What is also interesting is that medieval “witches” had much in common with today’s “abductees”, and the witch hunters also resemble some of today’s abduction “researchers” in surprisingly consistent ways.

Something fairly powerful has to be going on either inside the public imagination or out in the real world or both, in order to sustain nearly four centuries of torture, carnage, and religious persecution. The Church did not simply try and burn witches: It aggressively sought them out to try and burn them.

The infamous Malleus Maleficarum (compiled in 1486) is a detailed instructional Church manual on how to identify a witch and what to do when you find one. Professional witch hunters, employed by the Church, roamed the European countryside searching out witches and delivering them into the hands of Church inquisitors who usually ended up torturing and killing them to save their souls.

Although the Malleus isn’t a word-for-word precursor to Intruders or Missing Time, many elements are similar enough to warrant a closer look.

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If you’d like to check it out, go to Live Chat.

It’s pretty basic at the moment. I’ll pretty it up later. Right now I’m mostly interested in know what you think about it. What say ye?

I don’t know if the creator of this room is Pagan (although he is part of a group called “Pagan-Wiccan-Witch”) or has any connection with any of the various PTH’s scattered across the Internet, or if this person just created a room based upon a cool name (we all know that’s happened many times), but at the moment there is a PTH on IMVU. If you’d like to check it out, head on over and create an avatar.

Be careful how you create your avatar, though. I created mine initially as female as a joke, but now can’t change the sex. Haven’t decided whether to delete the account and start over, or just live with the mistake. Hell, everyone thinks I’m female anyway because of my name.

Links

• Pagan Tea House @ IMVU
• lddragon – room creator

It’s that, if nothing else, that keeps me coming back. I may not be the best steward for this idea, but I am certainly one person who refuses to let it go. If I serve no other purpose, let it be to keep alive our memories of “the history and legacy of a genuinely good idea”.

Unfortunately, all of the web chat scripts that I found suck. Majorly. But then, really, doesn’t web chat in general suck? There’s nothing quite as useful where chat is concerned as Internet Relay Chat. So, since I didn’t really think of this web site as a PTH in and of itself, we’ll skip the chat function for now. Unless somebody comes up with a great idea.

Forums are another story. I could easily put up a forum script so that people could leave messages and what-not. The only problem is that I don’t have the time to moderate a forum, and an un-moderated forum is out of the question. The last time I had a forum up I spent inordinate amounts of time every week just deleting the bogus registrations. Spammers love forums. So if we were to put up a forum, we’d definitely need moderators. Any volunteers?

I’d appreciate any input from people who have ideas about how best to use this web site. With a nod to the old PTH Group, I don’t really want this web site to become a clique unto itself. I want every person from any PTH chat room, chat channel or networking system to feel at home here. So… I’m open to suggestions.

I visited the various chat rooms on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and didn’t find any warm bodies. This seems to be a recurring theme. I’m beginning to wonder if chat is dead. What’s the point of 10 to 15 people being in a chat room or channel if no one ever speaks in the channel? If you’re going to log in and only talk privately to other people in the channel, what’s the point in being there? And one has to wonder if any of these people understand what the word “chat” means.

I’ve also perused the web sites that are out there. As usual there are surviving pages from the ancient days, drifting about in the ether like relics of a forgotten time. Then there are the pages that have been put up as shrines to the vanity of some channel operator, or just some dweeb who chose to claim the name “Pagan Tea House” for their own use.

This begs the obvious question; one which I will pose to the old-timers. Is the idea of the Pagan Tea House finally dead? Did we finally let it slip from the realm of possibility into the dark, depraved corners of distant memory? Did we pass the torch to a younger generation, only to discover that they’re only going to use it to light their tiki torches and cigars?

I don’t know, friends. It’s not good when you spend an hour in the EFnet PTH, rolling doughnuts across the proverbial floor and waiting for some kind of response, and getting nothing. It’s also not a good time that in that hour not one person joined the channel. The UnderNet PTH was no different, really. Is chat dead?

If the general idea of the Pagan Tea House is thriving anywhere, it’s on social networks like Newsvine and Ning. Those are the only places where I found any life. Has PTH culture finally morphed into something useful, beyond cutting backflips into a virtual hot tub and arguing over spirituality or who came before who in some chat channel’s pantheon?

Personally, I’d like to think so. The tag line of this web site is “the history and legacy of a genuinely good idea”. There are enough bad ideas in the world. I think we should hang on to the good ones as long as we can, and we should never let them go without a fight.

To those who sit quietly in chat rooms and channels under the banner of “Pagan Tea House” but do not welcome new arrivals or respond to the words of people you don’t know, I contend that you have no idea what “Pagan Tea House” stood for and you sully its memory.

But to those on Newsvine and Ning, who are engaging in dialogue and the free exchange of information, I want you to know that you remind me of all that was good about the original Pagan Tea House. And while you don’t need it, and certainly don’t seek it, I’d like to offer my sincere well wishes and blessing as one of the members of the first PTH. It’s not how I thought it would be done, but I’m glad to see that someone has picked up the banner and is carrying it farther down the line.

Unfortunately, now that we’ve established that basic goal, I have no idea what to do with this web site. The various PTHs that exist are happily insular, with no real interest in outside contact. The occasional old-timer who has wandered through has universally stated that this web site is a good idea, but has shown little interest beyond that. Therefore I suppose maybe we should approach this web site as something of a museum piece, and simply fill out the archives.

So… any suggestions?

Anyway, the site is back online. I’ll be tinkering with more things regarding the PTH community, looking for ways to help us reach out to one another (although history has shown that most of us aren’t really interested in doing that).

I promise I’ll get a lot more information up here soon. I’m going to be digging out all things related to the PTHs and listing them in some form on this site. I’m also going to be posting some links to PTH survivors who are out there on the Web doing what they do best.