ASH WEDNESDAY---PAGAN TRADITIONS

 

Many Christians attend special Ash Wednesday church services, at which churchgoers receive ash on their foreheads. Ash Wednesday derives its name from this practice, which is accompanied by the words, "Repent, and believe in the Gospel" or the dictum "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."^[9] The ashes are prepared by burning palm leaves from the previous year's Palm Sunday celebrations.^[10]

                                                    PAGAN ORIGINS

The practice of putting ashes on one's forehead has been known from ancient times. In the Nordic pagan religion, placing ashes above one's brow was believed to ensure the protection of the Norse god, Odin. This practice spread to Europe during the Vikings conquests. This laying on of ashes was done on Wednesday, the day named for Odin, Odin's Day. Interestingly enough, according to Wikipedia, one of Odin's names is Ygg. The same is Norse for the World Ash. This name Ygg, closely resembles the Vedic name Agni in pronunciation.

The Norse practice which has become known as Ash Wednesday was itself, drawn from the Vedic Indian religion. Ashes were believed to be the seed Agni , the Indian fire god. It is from this name that the Latins used for fire, ignis. It is from this root word that the English language got the words, ignite, igneous and ignition. Agni was said to have the authority to forgive sins. Ashes were also believed to be symbolic for the purifying blood of the Vedic god Shiva, which it is said had the power to cleanse sins.

Brianna Ghey Vigil Edinburgh 17/2/23

 

ON THE WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT AND ITS FRAGMENTATION e.g. IN EDINBURGH

 

This is an excerpt from my draft manuscript Lavender Rising: An Intersectional History of the LGBTQ+ Struggle. Comments or suggested additions would be welcome. Section 2.9 will be about the Lavender Menace bookshop on Forth St. 

2.6 THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT

For a time-line of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), see British Library [1]. It starts in 1961 with the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill. In 1967, abortion was legalised in Britain for women who were up to 24 weeks pregnant.

More than 600 women attended the first national WLM conference at Ruskin College Oxford in February 1970. The following first four WLM demands were discussed:

1. Equal pay now

2. Equal educational and job opportunities

3. Free contraception and abortion on demand

4. Free 24-hour nurseries for children

The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in Scotland is described in close detail in a landmark book by Sarah Browne (2014).

In July 1974 the National WLM conference was held in James Gillespie’s High School in Marchmont, Edinburgh, and attended by over 900 women from around Britain. (see Sarah Browne, pp 96-97)

This was regarded as a seminal turning point in women’s liberation because of a previous decline in attendances. However, deep and increasingly bitter divisions emerged over the issue of sexuality, in particular surrounding a sixth demand that focussed on lesbianism.

Nevertheless, the fifth and sixth demands were added to the first four:

5. Legal and financial independence for all women

6. The right to a self-defined sexuality. An end to discrimination against lesbians

Esther Breitenbach, who attended the Edinburgh conference, observed that ‘the euphoria of the first wave of sisterhood was wearing off, and in its place was to come increasingly bitter division.’

A growing exasperation with the loose structure of WLM was evident in a letter published in the Edinburgh Women’s Liberation Newsletter in 1975. It bemoaned the lack of a speaker’s panel representing local groups, since invitations were getting lost or unanswered. The movement was largely unstructured.

Only sixty women attended a badly organised Scottish WLM conference held in Inch Community Centre in Edinburgh in 1978. They were drowned by the competing noise of an intrusive rock group, and the conference was abandoned,

According to British Library [1], the National WLM Conference in Birmingham in 1978 added a seventh demand:

7. Freedom from intimidation by threat or use of violence or sexual coercion, regardless of marital status and an end to all laws, assumptions and institutions which perpetuate male dominance and men’s aggression towards women

Anna Coote (1978) reports that this, the tenth and last National WLM conference, met at Ladywood School in Birmingham, and was attended by over 3000 women. On the Sunday of the conference, a number of specialist workshops were held on topics such as women in printing, women against fascism and racism, guilt and jealousy, the national abortion campaign, country women and Jewish women.

Margaret Jolly (2019) describes a history of the British WLM from 1968 to present and explores why and how feminism’s ‘second wave’ mobilized to demand not just equality but social and gender transformation

2.7 THE FRAGMENTATION OF WLM

Sarah Browne (2014, p182) laments the fragmentation of WLM in Britain during the late 1970s, but asserts that WLM was alive and kicking in Scotland in the 1980s. On p185 she records that WLM has inspired a new group of women, including the activist members of Slutwalks (see Vicki Allen, 2011) that challenged the sexualisation of women.

Maybe all the efforts between 1980 and 1990 of the women in Scotland discussed by Shirley Henderson and Alison Mackay, eds (1990) were influenced by WLM in some way. For example, on page 89 of this splendid collection, the establishment of incest survivors women’s self-help groups in Edinburgh and Glasgow is described.

Later women motivated by WLM should certainly include the brave members of the trans-inclusive Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre ERCC and the pro-active group Sisters Uncut (see ACE [1]).

Sisters Uncut shut up shop in Edinburgh in 2019 when the grass roots Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh (ACE) splintered and closed its doors after 22 years on West Montgomery Place. 

Before 2019, the meetings in ACE of Sisters Uncut were open to all women (trans, intersex and cis) and all non-binary, agender and gender variant people. Meanwhile two local feminist charities were a bit less grass-roots pro-active. See Engender [1] and Zero Tolerance[1].

The Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre ERCC opened on 1 July 1978 with a vigil on Princes Street and to a fanfare of publicity (see ERCC[1]). ERCC was funded by private donations, and its first premises were on Forth St. in Broughton.

For a detailed timeline listing many of ERCC’s socially essential accomplishments, see ERCC[2]. In 2001, ERCC changed its name to Edinburgh Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (EWRASAC) For a very thorough oral history of rape crisis in Scotland, see Eileen Maitland, ed. (2009). Edinburgh’s very active rape crisis centre is, as of February 2023, located on Claremont Crescent in Broughton.

Adam Ramsey (2022) describes how anti-trans activists forced the rape centre into lock-down [when it was housed opposite Blenheim Place on London Road]. During 2021, the activists hounded the centre’s trans-woman director Mridul Wadhwa on social media with a torrent of venomous tweets and hundreds of threats of vigilante violence, as part of a pattern of attacks on trans-inclusive feminist groups. Then the transphobic public media joined in. During Autumn 2021 the rape centre ended its open door policy, and installed both an intercom system for access and a reinforced inner door.

BBC News (2022) reported that the arch-TERF J.K.Rowling had more recently founded a women-only rape centre Beira’s Place in Edinburgh. Given her horrific publicly-spewed opinions, Rowling doubtlessly meant cisgender-women-only.

Joanna Cherry KC, MP is well known to be a lesbian woman with policies that would be regarded by many trans people as transphobic. When such viewpoints are expressed by lesbian women or gay men, they injure the entire LGBT+ movement by involving us in a fractious struggle between each other. I find it difficult to theorise why people would want to go out of their way to be transphobic, and I regard transphobes as busy-bodying into other people’s business.

In February 2020 Cherry gave a resounding speech to the Women’s Liberation 2020 Conference at UCL, on the fiftieth anniversary of the first UK WLM conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970). See Joanna Cherry (2020). That was while eugenics was still getting hotly debated on the UCL campus, following the investigations by the Commission of Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL during 2019 (see Chapter 4).

The ever ready students protested the Women’s Liberation Conference, while describing it as a ‘TERF’ Conference and claiming that’our existence should not be a debate’. See Susanna Chen and Rhea Deshpande (2020).

Meanwhile, at the official fiftieth anniversary Women’s Liberation meeting at Ruskin College Oxford, the feminist historian Professor Selina Todd was effectively no-platformed for being allegedly trans-phobic, and a furious row ensued (see Vanessa Thorpe, 2020).

So the Women’s Liberation supporters were still split, some 40 years after WLM first splintered.

ON THE MASSIVE EXPLOITATION OF HOME-VISIT CARERS IN SCOTLAND

 

                                            CARERS FROM AFAR  A Poem by Tom Leonard

Edinburgh grew rich on slavery while nurturing the growth of capitalism during the eighteenth century Enlightenment and beyond, and the colonialists built statues of each other in the wealthy epicentre of the city. Elsewhere, the ‘voices from below’, the poor and vulnerable, still suffer, and find themselves thrown out of their historical refuges in the Cowgate, pressurised to leave the affluent epicentre, and often forced to commute from the high rises in the suburbs, or from the post-industrial areas in Midlothian and West Lothian.

After Brexit in January 2020, more and more carers from Africa and the Indian subcontinent were exploited to an extreme degree by Edinburgh City Council and the care agencies who operated the home visit system for Social Care Direct. Many of the carers from afar were graduate students attending Napier University and St. Margaret’s College for fees of about £15000 per annum and with legislated living cost requirements of about £1000 per month.

In return, the carers were frugally paid for their several home visits a day, while travelling around the city in buses, their own cars, and Ubers, for scant reimbursement. The carers who worked in nursing homes were paid much better. However, Edinburgh grew wealthier from neo-colonialism once again, while many of the ‘home visit’ carers survived in abject penury.

Moreover, the several thousand student carers across Scotland were injecting huge net amounts of money into the economy, of the order of at least £20000 a year each. Hence the ‘student carers from afar’ system was supporting the Scottish economy to the tune of over £100 billion a year!

DO HEADSHRINKERS PRACTISE EUGENICS ON LGBTQI+ PEOPLE?

 Except from AN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY OF LGBTQI+ACTIVISM, in preparation

                     

My selective history of psychiatry focuses, in part, on the history in Edinburgh, but also on international material collated during my years twelve or so years campaigning campaigning against problematic modern psychiatry e.g. as convenor of the Facebook page Mental Health Discussions Edinburgh. The excellent work on depressive disorders by Professor Joanne Moncrieff at UCL has epitomised the need for, albeit belated, change during the 2020s.

While I am a retired Bayesian statistician, there is an almost complete dearth of statistics in this, my third book. I indeed refer to my very own philosophy:

Most statistics are potentially misleading, but some could be useful for making qualitative assessments.

To give three examples:

(1) It is very difficult to use a census to count the number of individuals in a population, since undercounts can be quite sizeable and related, for instance, to social deprivation, Furthermore, the population may itself be undefined or time varying, e.g. because of migration, immigration, birth and death.

(2) The Kinseyian 1948 ‘estimate’ that 10% of the American male population was gay is at best a ball-park figure owing to (a) lack of replicated randomisation at the experimental design stage (b) lack of precise definition of gayness, and (c) the quite acceptable propensity of gay men to lie when posed with the question, owing to fright about possible repercussions. The ‘true percentage’ could be anything between 1% and 37%.

(3) My subjective assertion that ‘gay men (or women) are five times more likely to have at some time experienced mental health issues when compared with those who are not gay’ cannot be empirically validated for a host of reasons. It nevertheless provides us, in qualitative terms with a potentially useful working hypothesis.

If 20% of a male population have at some time experienced mental health issues, then the working hypotheses in (2) and (3) would together imply that the proportion of gay men in this population who have experienced mental health issues is 5/7 whereas the proportion of not gay men who have experienced mental health issues is only 1/7.

Consequently any employment policy or over-harsh psychiatric treatment that discriminates against or harms men who’ve had mental health issues would tend to discriminate against or harm a large majority of gay men. In particular, the psychiatric profession may currently be effectively practising eugenics on our gay populations, Such qualitative assessments justify the intersectional nature of this book.

The preceding calculations can be justified by a simple application of Bayes Theorem and the Law of Total Probability. See pp 76-67 of Bayesian Methods (Thomas Leonard and John Hsu, C.U.P. 1999)