Dark Knights of Steel #9

[cyberghostface]

 

Comments

[scorntx]

The chances of Alfred coming from Mars are a million to one.
A million to one!
Yet still...


"If they're vulnerable to fire, maybe they're not actual demons."
"Of course not. Demons look completely different."
(Given demons are generally pretty heavily associated with fire, a vulnerability to it would be what is generally known as an occupational health and safety nightmare waiting to happen...)

[bravest_spinja]

From a purely medieval/scriptural perspective, I want to say demons aren't particularly immune to it--fire seemed to be a device as often, if not more, divine as it was demonic. The final judgment says the Devil and cohorts will be cast into a Lake of Fire. And it sure seems like it would be a weird way to dispose of witches if demons were masters of fire.

I would guess fire being "a thing" with demons and devils might owe itself to 1) The conflation of the Djinn of Islam with demons, 2) Inferno being the the work to codify people's image of Hell (The lowest level of Hell is freezing, but I imagine the title emphasized "Hell is hot".) and 3) Paradise Lost and its famous verse solidify Hell as something Satan and his host as the master of, not trapped in like the rest of us poor dead schmucks.

[numeronone]

NTM it's been seen as a holy purifying element - the Chariot of Fire, calling fire down from heaven as a miracle, etc...

[cainofdreaming]

Most witches were hung rather than burned though, weren't they? Stands to reason, why waste fuel you could use to warm your house when the winter comes when you could just use a bit of sturdy rope for several of satan's bedfellows?

[bravest_spinja]

So I want to say


In the Middle Age proper, one got burned for heresy. Witch burnings were rare, as, to some degree, talking about witches as a real thing was itself more likely to get accused of heresy than anything else. (Joan of Arc was burned for heresy, in what was, tbh, a real calculate political snowjob, but might had a real effect on how people viewed heresy, witchcraft, etc.)

Near the end of the Middle Ages, early modern period, that turned a corner. One was actually the Reformation. The complaints about social media are in many ways, echos of the printing press, in that democratization of media also had the side effect of propagating, excuse me if this violates the group's TOS, absolute basket cases. With the the decentralization of Christianity, cast a wider net on "heresy", and in turn, believed Witches were everywhere. The European witchhunt did earn the epithet "the burning times".

However,by the 17th century, hanging was indeed the way of executing those accused of witchcraft, particularly those in the New World.

[reveen]

This is why I think fantasy/historical reimaginings of superhero stuff has a limited shelf life. Keep going and eventually, you're gonna start seeing aliens and giant robots and you've looped all the way back around into sci-fi territory.

[walkingthroughforest]

I mean, this entire series rests on the presence of aliens, soooo....