Witchcraft & Vegetarianism

this is from a blog I am trying to follow but it seems to have no follow button :) Love this entire idea & way of life ♥

   Before getting onto the recipes, I had better answer a question I often get asked. Why should a witch's kitchen be animal free? Surely it should be full of "eye of newt", "toe of frog," and other such gruesome ingredients. Well, even when "normal" society thought we were making flying potions out of boiled babies there were vegan witches. Look at the example of a midwife who was burned in Scotland. Among her many henious crimes (not letting the priest attend the birth, washing everything in clean water, insisting the mothers breast feed, instead of feeding the newborn a first meal of whiskey mixed with cow's milk) was included the fact that she "has these many years kept the black fast."

The "black fast", for those who haven't heard of it, is how the witch finders described a diet free of milk, eggs, dairy, fish, flesh or foul. As you can imagine it was very hard in the British Isles to stick to such a diet, given that we have what is described as the "hungry gap" - a period through the winter when you just can't grow vegetables because it is so dark and grim. The midwife living in Scotland must have had this problem in spades, given that it is even colder and grimmer up there in the winter than it is in England. And yet somehow she stuck to her guns for years, in the face of her neighbours' suspicions, and ended up dying for her convictions.

Most people in Christian Europe kept the "black fast" through lent, then delightedly went back to eating their usual fair as soon as they could. In fact many people couldn't even keep it up for six weeks, and chowed down on water animals, since they didn't really count. That is how come the beaver became extinct in the British Isles, in case you wondering. Which is why Cambridgeshire has turned into a marshy quagmire in many areas - the beavers don't build their damns anymore, and the water is reclaiming the earth. What you do comes back to you...

However, there were always those who eschewed the idea of consuming animal products. The Cathars were such - some of them ate fish because they saw no sexual behaviour in them, and decided that they were not animals, and grew in the water. Nowadays they would know better, and be vegan. Even at the time some Cathars preferred to err on the side of caution, and didn't eat fish either.

The Cathars were utterly wiped out, burned to death, butchered in their thousands, for their "heresy." Hildegard of Bingen followed a similar diet - and she was a famous healer, who was accused of witchcraft, despite her position as the head of a convent. Her music and poetry is still listened to and greatly admired. There is evidence that Joan of Arc was a vegan, and there is no doubt at all that Leonardo Da Vinci and his boyfriend (the famous "universal man") were both vegan - and for animal rights rather than religious reasons. In fact Da Vinci was regularly accused of witchcraft, and only his incredible talent kept him safe.

These people took moral stances at a time when to do so was difficult - to say the least. It is much easier for us now to follow our conscience then it was back then. It is unlikely that we are going to be burned to death for "keeping the black fast."