Meirl

autistically mourning pangea think of all the train potential

Bat cat character sheet

i'm an adult but i still think penis humor is funny which is why my eldritch horror story has a dick joke in it. i tried to resist i really did.

Whatever the person behind SparkNotes' twitter is being paid it's not enough pt. you can't pay me to dig up which part this is

The Beer Witch Post

(or how the stereotypical Wicked Witch is based in part on female brewsters*) 

Some background:

Women have been brewing beer for nearly 10 thousand years! 

That’s right! Beer is traditionally a woman’s drink, in that it was invented, produced, and drunk by women (and children) for all of recorded history. (src)

Beer only recently became associated with men (around the time it was commercialized of course!)  How did this happen?

Like many things, it involved the Church and a Witch Hunt.

(Note: this post is about a western stereotype; the action takes place in Europe.) Around the 11th cent., the Church realized that brewing alcohol was a great way for monasteries to generate revenue. At the time, brewing was the domain of Germanic tribal woman, and was important bc:

there was a huge demand for ale, due to its cheapness and the lack of potable water in most households

it allowed women to generate their own income at home.

That first part smelled like profit to the Church. That second part meant female independence, which they didn’t like at all. The solution was to get women out of brewing, and monasteries in. What better way than a witch hunt?

Of course, to have a good witch hunt, first you have to invent a witch.

Inventing the Wicked Witch

As female brewsters were pushed out of their fields (being denied licenses and guild membership), the Church set up shop. Monasteries & nunneries were sort of the perfect place to manufacture, what with their land & resources & free labor. Women were still the main brewers in many communities, but this would change over the centuries as the Church waged a War of Defamation against alewives & brewesses. 

The association between woman and sin has always been an easy argument to make, biblically. As women, alewives were ridiculously easy to defame. The rhetoric went something along the lines of:

women created sin

women are sinful

women use beer to spread their sinful ways & take money from men

Alewives, who ran alehouses, were cast as treacherous, deceitful women who cheated men by luring them into playgrounds for the devil, ruled by the sins of gluttony and lust.  

Alewives in hell became a popular Church-spread trope:  

“The Church specifically taught that alewives would be the only people left in hell after Christ freed all the damned.“ (src)

Thus, female brewers became easy target to associate with the devil, and with witchcraft. 

Whether or not brewsters were outright accused of consorting with the devil, the implication was there. And later, so was the imagery.

The Church’s centuries-long smear campaign worked too, helped by the fact that as brewing became more lucrative, more men entered the field, and were happy to help push women out. By the 17th century, the (European) brewing industry was male dominated, for the first time in human history. 

Witchcraft & Brewing: Symbology

The lifestyles, clothing, and tools of real women brewers were taken and used as iconography for witchcraft. 

Many of the props associated with the stereotypical Wicked Witch were just common objects alewives used to denote the brewing trade.

CALUDRONS & CATS: The image of a woman standing over a boiling cauldron once had a very different connotation: ale brewing. Cats, of course, were kept around to protect the grain supply.

BROOMSTICKS: these symbols of domestic trade were used as advertisements. A broom or ALESTAKE hung outside a home or alehouse was an easy-to-recognize sign that ale was available to buy. (Keep in mind that before literacy was common, most signs would be symbolic, not written.)

THOSE BIG, DISTINCTIVE HATS: This was a marketing thing too! Wearing a large hat to stand out in the market crowd was a symbol of a brewster with wares to sell. (src)

An Alewife, in her innocent witchy attire. Simple advertising like these allowed women to sell brews that they were already often making for their families at home.

The more you know! A shoutout to all those ladies brewing throughout history, from priestesses to alewives to homemakers alike. For thousands of years, generation after generation of families were fed & watered & kept healthy by women brewing at home. Thank you ladies, for your service.

if you enjoy my posts, i have a ko-fi! (this post took about 2 hours to research/write. links below)

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Autism Acceptance Month 2k20: Autistic Headcanons

↳ Allison Reynolds (The Breakfast Club)

“I don’t have to run away and live in the street. I can run away and I can go to the ocean, I can go to the country, I can go to the mountains.”

Bob’s Burgers official trailer

Autism Acceptance Month: Autistic Headcanons

↳ Lydia Deetz (Beetlejuice)

“Well, I read through that Handbook for the Recently Deceased. It says live people ignore the strange and unusual. I myself am strange and unusual.”

Jack O’Lantern Facts!

Jack O’Lanterns are an Irish tradition and were originally carved from turnips.

They were meant to ward off malevolent spirits, and keep them away from the home.

The name jack-o’-lantern was originally another name for will-o’-the-wisp, the atmospheric ghost lights that appear over bogs, swamps, and marshes. 

The lights are a natural chemical reaction, and figure largely in English folklore.

They’re tied to the Irish legend of STINGY JACK, a deceitful drunkard who tricked the Devil out of claiming his soul. After his death, both heaven and hell refused him entry. The devil gave him an ember of hellfire, which Jack carries in a turnip lantern as his soul wanders for all eternity. Travelers must beware of encountering his spirit–and the telltale glow of the hellfire–at night.

Irish immigrants carried the tradition to the U.S., where pumpkins, already a symbol of the harvest season, were used instead. (And were also easier to carve.) 

(the turnips were freakier tbh)

12:01 a.m. on november 1st