The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #161044 Message #3824557
Posted By: Thompson
05-Dec-16 - 04:39 AM
Thread Name: Folklore: Automatic Gestures
Subject: RE: Folklore: Automatic Gestures
If you think of the English in Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries, it's useful to reference ISIS. As Protestant fundamentalists, they broke up church art, tortured and burned non-Protestant clergy, stole church land and gave it to prominent fundamentalists. Their aim was to steal - redistribute - the good land to Protestants, and to wipe out the Papists, either directly as in Walter Ralegh and his stepbrother and friends' murders in Munster, or by deporting them to poor land on which it was impossible to live. And they were deeply superstitious, in much the same way as Isis fighters today; when Rory Óg O'More succeeded in escaping every ambush they set for him, they became convinced that he was a 'sorcerer'.
These were the same people who went off to what they named Jamestown in America - I saw a piece, in the National Geographic online, I think it was, recently that was all excited but baffled about strange goods found in the grave of one of the settlers - to anyone reading it with a little knowledge it was obvious that the marks were 'apotropaic' marks and the goods secret Mass goods, but the archaeologists hadn't copped to this. Obviously a secret English Catholic had smuggled himself in among these fundamentalist settlers, as the safest place to hide!
But we're creeping off topic a little here, interesting though it is. What about the pointing-to-heaven gesture made by Islamic fundamentalists all over the world now - is this a new gesture, or just newly publicised?