>And oh man, Jinora and her freaky
>shaman powers and being some species of chosen one?

Here is a weird coincidence: Last week I read Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries for my Early Modern Europe course. This concerns the peculiar adventures (and Inquisitional misadventures) of a group of people in the Friuli region of Italy known as the benandanti (literally the "good walkers"), who claimed they were chosen by angels to do battle with witches, and who were - inevitably - persecuted by the Church as witches themselves.

The reason I say this is a weird coincidence is because on Thursday afternoon I happened upon this passage, which is a quotation from the testimony of a benandante to the Inquisition regarding the methods they used:

... if by chance while we are out someone should come with a light and look for a long time at the body, the spirit would never re-enter it until there was no one left around to see it that night; and if the body, seeming to be dead, should be buried, the spirit would have to wander around the world until the hour fixed for that body to die.

The benandanti, then, were a group of people who claimed that they went out at night through astral projection and defended the public against evil spirits, and that their technique was fraught with certain... logistical concerns.

Hmm. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.