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I haven't read any confirmation, but the designs look way too similar to be coincidental.
It would also be fitting that the Bene Gesserit "Witches" should adopt such an implement to test their own subjects, lol.
I thought the design looked like a cocktail sword.
I had no idea "needles used by street conjurers to identify witches in 16th and 17th century Europe" was even a category that has been a thing. History is fucking weird. Well, humans are fucking weird, I guess.
I wonder how that little loop helped identify them.
Probably not very well
I too read the article about witch needles but don't think the designs are similar at all.
The witch detecting needles are all defined by a handle into which the needle is mounted like a knife. This allowed the magician make it look like the needle was going into the skin when really it was just retracting into the handle.
The Dune needle is a single piece, tapered at both ends.
Some of the needles were found to have hollow handles with retractable points, yep, but not all as far as the article suggests. Invariably some needles would have drawn blood, otherwise the "tests" would have been even less credible to begin with.
As credible as such tests could appear even back then, lol.
Yes, not all were hollow but the ones that weren't fake looked identical to the ones that were fake so the trick could work.
My apologies for omitting the relevant link below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pricking
I included it as the URL for this post, but also uploaded the image above, thinking both would show up in the post.
I guess the upload overwrote (overrode?) the URL. I'm still learning Lemmy.