Vigils 'n' Sigils: You Can Dance, If You Want To

The fun starts here!

But only if you're naked.

My father emails to remind me that on this day in 1535 a number of our religious, and quite possibly genetic, forebears removed and burned their clothing then ran through the streets of Amsterdam, until they were arrested.

Google turns up varying accounts of this event -- the most reliable is likely here, on page 27. It's a distillation of Albert F. Mellinck's account in Documenta Anabaptistica Neerdlandica 5: Amsterdam 1531-1536.

"A small group of eleven Anabaptists, including four women, were inspired by their leader-prophet Heynrick Heynricxz to remove and burn their clothes in an upper room and then run out onto the streets of the city, crying 'woe, woe over the world and the godless,' proclaiming the 'naked truth.' Heynricxz claimed that he had seen and spoken to God and to have visited heaven and hell, assertions identical to those claimed of earlier shamanistic Waldensian masters."

Regular readers keeping track of dates will note this is a prelude to the infamous (to put it mildly) Münster Rebellion. Thus begins my tribe's colourful and thorny relationship with convictions of the heart, political protest, and slippery notions of revealed truth.

Next: reading the Washington offal.