During Christianity, both the outside and the inside polarization of Ancient Goddesses, just seen in the previous chapter, continued their development. Thanks to the outside polarization —i.e. a polarizing pattern good / evil with females, the Moon, and darkness of course filling the second category—, not only Goddesses, but also their female worshippers and priestesses began to be reckoned as evil characters.
The connection between females and darkness increased also because of the worshippers’ need of hiding themselves while worshipping their Goddesses, owing to the persecutions against pagans.
Artemis and the Nymphs (the former assimilated to the Roman Diana) became Witches, as their female worshippers did, especially while dancing in the nights of Full Moon. The holy goat was turned into the devil.
The ancient triad of the Moirai, deities of Destiny, became Faeries: in Roman times the Moirai were named Fata (plural genitive Fatorum), from fatum (singular genitive fati), that in Latin means just “destiny”. However, the plural neuter of the second Latin declination Fata – Fatorum in Middle Ages was understood as a singular feminine name of the first declination, fata – fatae, from which derived the Italian word fata, the Spanish hada, the French fee, and, perhaps, the English faery, all of them meaning a young female creature dwelling in woods and groves, borrowing such aspect from the Nymphs.
Thanks to the inside polarization —i.e. the feature of Goddesses of sharing two opposite aspects, the good and the evil—, faeries were often divided into good and bad faeries, while witches into white and black witches, and magic into white and black magic.
Although this opposition is quite common in witchcraft, it is important to bear in mind that it is not a genuine and original feature of Stone Age culture, but only the product of its Indo-Europeization.
