Salem Witches

I had never been to the witch museum in Salem before. We thought it would be something cool for the kids. Plus a friend of ours, from Taiwan, wanted to see the Chinese House at the Peabody Essex museum. Well I guess the presentation at the museum good. Not that I saw much of it. Jonah started freaking out almost immediately. For some reason I thought it was more of a museum and less of a show. Being in there it slowly began to dawn on me though that technically I am a witch. The book of spells was a bunch of herbs much like lerng cha, or ha gu cho that I boil when I have Yeet hai or over heating. These teas are called cooling teas. Basically the Chinese traditions, which in their modern forms are pretty harmless and also very cool are pagan, just like Christmas and Easter have pagan ancestries too. Of course that's not why the 19 people were hung. They weren't even really pagans. But I'm sure there were people around who were. But whatever that doesn't warrant killing them. So the Salem witch trials is usually held up as an example of Justice getting out of hand. The truth is, even today, if you are convicted, it is very hard to "unconvict" you even with DNA evidence proving you are innocent. I think the origins of a lot stuff that is stupid about our society today is can be seen in what happened in Salem.
But....
They was a lot of stupid stuff Pagan's used to do too. I only found this out recently but I think even in the MIng Dynasty, when they built a bridge in China, they would sacrifice a boy and a girl at either end to make sure the bridge would work. The virgin boy and girl often seen depicted in paintings for good luck and new year, so cute and happy, and the characters of these too put together creates the word for good. I new that. But I didn't know about the darker history of human sacrifice. In my mind human sacrifice and superstition happened in China's early history like Qin Dynasty, but I didn't realize that villages in the Qing Dynasty sometimes still practiced it. I mean during executions, they would use the criminal as a sacrifice, but that just seems practical, and I think even in the "Enlightened West" executions have some of that sacrifice to Odin type ceremony left over.. especially hangings.

Well I guess Noah sat calmly through the whole thing. Then we played in the children's discovery section of the PEM, got bored of that and had the kids pictures taken as warlocks. Jonah fell asleep mid pictures. It was a good day for it, being all misty and mysterious and all.