Be cool to each other. We'll welcome most occult themes, it's okay if you stray from witchcraft a bit.
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I think this post is based on very wrong assumptions. Healing people with herbs and folk remedies was a very normal part of early modern life. It wasn't particularly associated with women and those who practiced it would have enjoyed a degree of social status and personal independence, like any other useful trade.
They also call it science when a woman puts it in a pill.
And when men didn't put it in a pill they called it "snake oil" or "alchemy".
I normally consider Lady Butterfly to be one of the better posters on Lemmy, but this meme is a whiff.
Edit: Upon doing some more digging I had forgotten that the term "witch" was gender-neutral in Europe prior to colonization. Even in the Salem witch trials, about a quarter of the "witches" persecuted were men. You could also look at the uneducated masses who demonized modern, scientifically-based doctors during the Covid-19 pandemic, like Dr Fauci in the US. And this meme also erases the historical women of medicine, from ancient and near-mythological figures like Metrodora to better-documented women like Hildegard of Bingen.
I mean, you could argue that wise women doing traditional medicine isn't based on the scientific method, while most of modern pharmacology (by men or women) arguably is.
Doesn't mean that one works and the other doesn't, it just means they're getting their results with different methods.
You could also argue that men doing “medicine” in history is also not based on much of a scientific method. Seriously, particularly old medical texts are completely bonkers and there’s no way to argue that those dudes had any better of an idea about what they were doing. Some of the newer ones(couple hundred years old, say) are a bit better but were still pretty fucked.
And then there’s all the dudes who refused to use any kind of scientific method to change their ideas. Like, it’s amazing how long it took to learn about hand-washing or that maybe we shouldn’t have open sewers in crowded cities.
The “witches” in many cases were probably also doing trial-and-error just as much as the men were. And yes, I would be stupid to say they weren’t also doing crazy things but I’d have to be pretty goofy to act like men weren’t getting praise where women would get punishment.
Yeah I've have had encounters people who were super anti-chemicals, it had to be all natural all the time. Not only are they ignoring that litteraly every thing ever is made of chemicals and just because it's natural, doesn't mean it's good for you. But these people also had all of those granny says recipes to do all sorts of stuff, like in the olden days we had this secret knowledge to for example clean stuff, all without any chemicals. Most of these recipes involved stuff like baking soda or vinegar for example, like bitch please you are literally doing chemistry.
The gympie-gympie is 100% natural! It is a cure-all, mainly by making you forget whatever ails you because your in too much pain...
Not false, however more true with autochtone knowledge that have been and is still looted by Imperialist firms.¹ This is still something, through patent for example