Here is an excerpt out of a book I picked up the other day at the library. I suspect wintermute and Petr might find it of interest, as witchcraft and heretics have tended to be a popular point of discussion in the past here:

In no country did the witch-cult flourish more rankly, in no country did the belief persist more lately, in no country did the prosecution of sorcery rage fiercer and the fires blaze brighter than in Scotland. The lonely hills and wild untrod moors, the echoing glens and remote glades, seemed the very places for the hauntings of mysterious powers, influences which were, however, in popular law always ranged on the side of evil, harbingers of death and destruction and hell. Even the realm of Faerie, whose denizens were thought of elsewhere as being bright spirits friendly to humankind, lovely, gay, bounteous of goodly gifts, in Scotland became the Court of Elfame, a fearful country ruled over by the Devil, who is actually spoken of as a fairy-man, inhabited by malignant fiends, where the revels of elves and petty pixies dancing their graceful rounds in the silvery moonlight, are a foul Sabbat of demons, hideous carlines and their dark familiars. It is, perhaps, no matter of surprise that under the quintessence of verjuice and venom, John Knox, whose loathsome slime fouled Caledonia from north to south and ate like putrid sore through to the very heart of her children, an intenser gloom, a deeper despair, fell upon the unhappy land. The supremacy of the Devil seems an essential feature of Calvinistic teaching. How can anyone look for tranquility or comfort, or ensue sweet communion with God, when his eyes are ever scorched and scarred by the red roar of the furnance of Hell, his ears ever stunned with the ceaseless howling of the damned, who are eternally agonising in the pit of Tophet? Christ came to give the world love and peace; Calvin and Knox stewed the cockle of hate and fear. And so in tis dour fanaticism the Kirk proved a sterner judge and a more cruel executioner than even Boguet or de Lancre; than Phillip-Adolph von Ehrenberg, the burning of Bishop of Würtzburg; or Chancellor Carpzow, who sent no less than twenty-thousand witches to the stake.

With these rolling periods, that strange and in some respects mysterious authority on witchcraft, the Reverend Montague Summers -- though he writes like a Roman Catholic, it is not positively known whether his orders stemmed from Rome -- begins his account of witchcraft in Scotland in his work The Geography of Witchcraft. But discounting his purple and his distaste of Calvinism and Presbyterian Kirk, Summers does accurately point to the terrible barbarity which the stern Scots applied to the prosecution of witchcraft. It is true, as Rossel H. Robbins points out in his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, that:

Scotland is second only to Germany in the barbarity of its witch trials. The Presbyterian clergy acted like inquisitors and the church sessions often shared the prosecution with the secular law courts. The Scottish laws were, if anything, more heavily loaded against the accused. Finally, the devilishness of the torture was limited only by Scotland's backward technology in the construction of mechanical devices. Suppression of any opposition to belieft in witchcraft was complete.

The persecution of witches in Europe began in 1450 and lasted for 300 years, till 1750. The surprising, and generally unknown, feature of the witchcraft which attracted the attention of ecclesiastical and civil authorities during this period -- which I call the period of Classical Witchcraft -- is that it was largely invented by the Inquisition and developed by it and the Catholic Church.

Soothsaying, divination of all kinds, sorcery, the used of charms and spells, rank with prostitution and espionage as the most ancient institutions in the world. It is nevertheless a fact, however, that certain features of the witchcraft of the Classical Period as incubi and succubi, the pact with the Devil, the Devil's marks and witch's marks, flying, the sabbat and its attendant orgies, were all thought up by the witch inquisitors, and by a gradual process of indoctrination became in time believed and put into practice by self-styled witches, until a whole edifice of conventional witchcraft behaviour was firmly constructed and that on an identical pattern almost everywhere it manifested itself.

The whole basis of Classical Witchcraft was vested in two main considerations. First, it was invented to provide work for an Inquisition that was threatened with unemployment after the suppression of the Albigensian heresy -- in 1375 the inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric bemoaned, 'At the present time, there are no more rich heretics, and in consequence princes, not seeing the prospect of obtaining much money, will not commit themselves to any great expenditure. It is a shame that so beneficial an institution as ours is should find its future so uncertain.' Second, purely on the basis that to perform evil deeds the witch must be in league with the Devil -- later the Pact with the Devil was formulated and introduced as a sine qua non of witchcraft practice -- and that such intercourse constituted a heresy. Once having accepted the fact that witchcraft was heretical, the Church proclaimed that the converse, that is, the refusal to accept the existence of witchcraft as conceived by the Church, was equally heretical.

I have used the phrase 'Witchcraft was invented', and I mean exactly that. And indeed the theologians and the laymen in the early days frankly admitted that it was an invention. Both in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were a number of theologians who would reject the dicta of the inquisitors if they felt so inclined, and do so with impunity. All the early persecutors of witches complained of the scepticism they were constantly meeting among experts in theology who ought to have known better; and their complaint of apathy amongst the secular authorities was almost as bitter. It was only by dint of pertinacious insistence on the part of the inquisitors that after many decades of advertising the new heresy by persecuting its alleged adherents and its opponents until all opposition was quashed, that at last a general acceptance of witchcraft was obtained.

Perhaps the most fantastic aspect of witchcraft as conceived by the Inquisition was that it ran contrary to all reason. When, after years of having the concept in all its details thrust at them, there were those who were sincerely able to accept its existence and its reality, their sincerity was in no whit eroded by the fact that in order to accept it they were acting under a delusion. Even more tragic is that an even worse delusion caused many to confess to acts of witchcraft as defined by the Inquisition, and thereby signed their own death warrants."

TBC.

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Here is some real scholarship on the issue:

It comes from a "hostile source" from a Christian viewpoint - published in a neo-pagan magazine, by a neo-pagan scholar:

http://www.cog.org/witch_hunt.html


"Jenny Gibbons has an M.A. in medieval history and minored in the history of the Great Hunt.
...

This article originally appeared in issue #5 of the Pomegranate (Lammas, 1998)."


Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt

by Jenny Gibbons


Since the late 1970's, a quiet revolution has taken place in the study of historical witchcraft and the Great European Witch Hunt. The revolution wasn't quite as dramatic as the development of radio-carbon dating, but many theories which reigned supreme thirty years ago have vanished, swept away by a flood of new data. Unfortunately, little of the new information has made it into popular history. Many articles in Pagan magazines contain almost no accurate information about the "Burning Times", primarily because we rely so heavily on out-dated research.


Beyond the National Enquirer

What was this revolution? Starting in the mid-1970's, historians stopped relying on witch-hunting propaganda and began to base their theories on thorough, systematic studies of all the witch trials in a particular area.

Ever since the Great Hunt itself, we've relied on witch hunters' propaganda: witch hunting manuals, sermons against witchcraft, and lurid pamphlets on the more sensational trials. Everyone knew that this evidence was lousy. It's sort of like trying to study Satanism in America using only the Moral Majority Newsletter and the National Enquirer. The few trials cited were the larger, more infamous ones. And historians frequently used literary accounts of those cases, not the trials themselves. That's comparable to citing a television docu-drama ("Based on a true story!") instead of actual court proceedings.

Better evidence did exist. Courts that tried witches kept records -- trial verdicts, lists of confiscated goods, questions asked during interogations, and the answers witches gave. This evidence was written by people who knew what actually happened. Witch hunters often based their books on rumor and hearsay; few had access to reliable information. Courts had less reason to lie since, for the most part, they were trying to keep track of what was going on: how many witches they killed, how much money they gained or lost, etc. Witch hunters wrote to convince people that witchcraft was a grievous threat to the world. The more witches there were, the bigger the "threat" was. So they often exagerrated the number of deaths and spread wild estimates about how many witches existed. Also, trial records addressed the full range of trials, not just the most lurid and sensational ones.

But trial data had one daunting draw-back: there was too much of it. Witch trials were scattered amongst literally millions of other trials from this period. For most historians, it was too much work to wade through this mass of data. The one exception was C. L'Estrange Ewen. In 1929 he published the first systematic study of a country's trial records: Witch Hunting and Witch Trials. Focused on England, his work offered vivid evidence of how much data literature missed. In Essex County, for instance, Ewen found thirty times as many trials as any previous researcher. Scholars were basing their theories on only 3% of the available evidence. And that 3% was vastly different from the other 97%.

In the 1970's other researchers followed in Ewen's footsteps, so in the last twenty-five years, the quantity and quality of available evidence has dramatically improved. Now we can look at all the trials from an area and see what the "normal" trial was really like. Court documents frequently contain detailed information on the gender, social status, and occupation of the accused. Today, for the first time, we have a good idea of the dimensions of the Great Hunt: where the trials occurred, who was tried in them, who did the killing, and how many people lost their lives.


400 In One Day: An Influential Forgery

Another, smaller breakthrough also profoundly altered our view of the early history of the Great Hunt. In 1972, two scholars independently discovered that a famous series of medieval witch trials never happened.

The forgery was Etienne Leon de Lamothe-Langon's Histoire de l'Inquisition en France, written in 1829. Lamothe-Langon described enormous witch trials which supposedly took place in southern France in the early 14th century. Run by the Inquisition of Toulouse and Carcasonne, these trials killed hundreds upon hundreds of people. The most famous was a craze where 400 women died in one day. No other French historian had noticed these trials.

In the early 20th century, the prominent historian Jacob Hansen included large sections of Lamothe-Langon's work in his compendium on medieval witchcraft. Later historians cited Hansen's cites, apparently without closely examining Lamothe-Langon's credentials. Non-academic writers cited the writers who cited Hansen, and thus Lamothe-Langon's dramatic French trials became a standard part of the popular view of the Great Hunt.

However, as more research was done, Lamothe-Langon's trials began to look odd to historians. No sources mentioned them, and they were completely different from all other 14th century trials. There were no other mass trials of this nature until 1428, no panics like this until the 16th century. Furthermore, the demonology in the trials was quite elaborate, with sabbats and pacts and enormous black masses. It was far more complex than the demonology of the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). Why would the Inquisition think up this elaborate demonology, and then apparently forget it for two hundred years?

Questions like these led Norman Cohn (Europe's Inner Demons and "Three Forgeries: Myths and Hoaxes of European Demonology II" in Encounter 44 (1975)) and Richard Kieckhefer (European Witch Trials) to investigate Lamothe-Langon's background. What they found was reasonably conclusive evidence that the great trials of the Histoire had never occurred.

First, Lamothe-Langon was a hack writer and known forger, not a historian. Early in his career he specialized in historical fiction, but he soon turned to more profitable horror novels, like The Head of Death, The Monastery of the Black Friars, and The Vampire (or, The Virgin of Hungary). Then, in 1829, he published the Histoire, supposedly a work of non-fiction. After its success Lamothe-Langon went on to write a series of "autobiographies" of various French notables, such as Cardinal Richeleau, Louis XVIII, and the Comtesse du Barry.

Second, none of Lamothe-Langon's sources could be found, and there was strong reason to suspect they never existed. Lamothe-Langon claimed he was using unpublished Inquisitorial records given to him by Bishop Hyacinthe Sermet -- Cohn found a letter from Sermet stating that there were no unpublished records. Lamothe-Langon had no training in paleography, the skill needed to translate the script and copious abbreviations used in medieval documents, and he was not posted in Toulouse long enough to do any serious research in its archives.

Third, under close examination a number of flaws appeared in his stories. He cited records written by seneschal Pierre de Voisins in 1275, but Voisins ceased being seneschal in 1254 and died not long after. The inquisitor who ran many of these trials was Pierre Guidonis (nephew of Bernard Gui from The Name of the Rose). But Guidonis wasn't an inquisitor at the time when the trials were held. Cohn and Kieckhefer published their findings in 1972. Since, then academics have avoided this forged material. Unfortunately by this point, Lamothe-Langon's lurid trials had entered into the mythology of witchcraft. While nobody cites Lamothe-Langon directly anymore, his fictions show up everywhere, including both Z Budapest's The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries and Raven Grimassi's The Wiccan Mysteries.

There's no simple way to weed out all of Lamothe-Langon's disinformation, but a few guidelines will help:

a) Use scholarly texts written after 1975. b) Beware of any trial set in Toulouse or Carcasonne. While these cities did have real cases, only the forged ones get cited regularly. c) Ignore any trial involving Anne-Marie de Georgel or Catherine Delort; they're forgeries. d) Ignore any trial that killed "400 women in one day." This never happened. e) Avoid Jules Michelet's Satanism and Witchcraft. Although he wrote a poetic and dramatic book, Michelet never found much historical evidence to support his theory that witchcraft was an anti-Catholic protest religion. What little bit there was came from the Lamothe-Langon forgeries. So when they were debunked, the last props for his book collapsed. f) The appendix of Richard Kieckhefer's European Witch Trials contains a list of all known trials that occurred between 1300 and 1500.


The New Geography of Witch Hunting

The pattern revealed by trial records bears little resemblence to the picture literature painted. Every aspect of the Great Hunt, from chronology to death toll, has changed. And if your knowledge of the "Burning Times" is based on popular or Pagan literature, nearly everything you know may be wrong.

a) Chronology.

Popular history places the witchcraft persecutions in the Middle Ages (5th-14th centuries). 19th century historians considered the Great Hunt an outburst of superstitious hysteria, fostered and spread by the Catholic Church. "Naturally", therefore, the persecution would be worst when the Church's power was the greatest: in the Middle Ages, before the Reformation split "the" Church into warring Catholic and Protestant sects. Certainly there were trials in the early modern period (15th-18th centuries), but they must have been a pale shadow of the horrors that came before.

Modern research has debunked this theory quite conclusively. Although many stereotypes about witches pre-date Christianity, the lethal crazes of the Great Hunt were actually the child of the "Age of Reason." Lamothe-Langon's forged trials were one of the last stumbling blocks that kept the theory of medieval witch hunting alive, and once these trials are removed, the development of witchcraft stereotypes becomes much clearer. All pre-modern European societies believed in magick. As far as we can tell, all passed laws prohibitting magickal crimes. Pagan Roman law and the earliest Germanic and Celtic law codes all contain edicts that punish people who cast baneful spells. This is only common sense: a society that believes in the power of magick will punish people who abuse that power.

Many of the stereotypes about witches have been with us from pre-Christian times. From the Mediterranean to Ireland, witches were said to fly about at night, drinking blood, killing babies, and devouring human corpses. We know this because many early Christian missionaries encouraged newly converted kingdoms to pass laws protecting men and women from charges of witchcraft -- charges, they said, that were impossible and un-Christian. For example, the 5th century Synod of St. Patrick ruled that "A Christian who believes that there is a vampire in the world, that is to say, a witch, is to be anathematized; whoever lays that reputation upon a living being shall not be received into the Church until he revokes with his own voice the crime that he has committed." A capitulary from Saxony (775-790 CE) blamed these stereotypes on pagan belief systems: "If anyone, deceived by the Devil, believes after the manner of the Pagans that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and if on this account he burns [the alleged witch]... he shall be punished by capital sentence."

In the Middle Ages, the laws on magick remained virtually unchanged. Harmful magick was punished, and the lethal trials we know of tended to occur when a noble felt that he or she had been bewitched. The Church also forbade magick and assigned relatively mild penalties to convicted witches. For instance, the Confessional of Egbert (England, 950-1000 CE) said that "If a woman works witchcraft and enchantment and [uses] magical philters, she shall fast [on bread and water] for twelve months.... If she kills anyone by her philters, she shall fast for seven years."

Traditional attitudes towards witchcraft began to change in the 14th century, at the very end of the Middle Ages. As Carlo Ginzburg noted (Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbat), early 14th century central Europe was seized by a series of rumor-panics. Some malign conspiracy (Jews and lepers, Moslems, or Jews and witches) was attempting to destroy the Christian kingdoms through magick and poison. After the terrible devastation caused by the Black Death (1347-1349) these rumors increased in intensity and focused primarily on witches and "plague-spreaders".

Witchcraft cases increased slowly but steadily from the 14th-15th century. The first mass trials appeared in the 15th century. At the beginning of the 16th century, as the first shock-waves from the Reformation hit, the number of witch trials actually dropped. Then, around 1550, the persecution skyrocketed. What we think of as "the Burning Times" -- the crazes, panics, and mass hysteria -- largely occurred in one century, from 1550-1650. In the 17th century, the Great Hunt passed nearly as suddenly as it had arisen. Trials dropped sharply after 1650 and disappeared completely by the end of the 18th century.

b) Geography

Before Lamothe-Langon's forgeries were discovered, the earliest great hunts appeared to come from southern France. in an area once the home of the Cathar heresy. This led some historians to suggest a link between Catharism and witchcraft, that witches were the remnants of an old dualist faith. After you delete the forged trials, the center of the early cases shifts to "Switzerland" and northern Italy, away from Cathar lands.

When all trials are plotted on a map, other surprising patterns emerge. First, the trials were intensely sporadic. The rate of witch hunting varied dramatically throughout Europe, ranging from a high of 26,000 deaths in Germany to a low of 4 in Ireland. Robin Briggs' Witches and Neighbors can give you a good feel for how erratic the trials were. It contains three maps showing the distribution of trials throughout Europe, throughout Germany, and throughout the French province of Lorraine, which Briggs studied in depth. They reveal that some of the most enormous persecutions (like the panics of Wurzburg, Germany) occurred next to areas that had virtually no trials whatsoever.

Second, the trials were concentrated in central Europe, in Germany, Switzerland, and eastern France. The further you got away from that area, the lower the persecution generally got.

Third, the height of the persecution occurred during the Reformation, when the formerly unified Christian Church shattered into Catholic and Protestant sects. In countries like Italy and Spain, where the Catholic Church and its Inquisition reigned virtually unquestioned, witch hunting was uncommon. The worst panics took place in areas like Switzerland and Germany, where rival Christians sects fought to impose their religious views on each other.

Fourth, panics clustered around borders. France's major crazes occurred on its Spanish and eastern fronts. Italy's worst persecution was in the northern regions. Spain's one craze centered on the Basque lands straddling the French/Spanish border.

Fifth, although it has become commonplace to think of the outbreaks of witch hunting as malevolent pogroms imposed by evil elites, in reality the worst horrors occured where central authority had broken down. Germany and Switzerland were patchwork quilts, loose confederacies stitched together from dozens of independent political units. England, which had a strong government, had little witch hunting. The country's one and only craze took place during the English Civil War, when the government's power collapsed. A strong, unified national church (as in Spain and Italy) also tended to keep deaths to a minimum. Strong governments didn't always slow witch hunting, as King James of Scotland proved. But the worst panics definitely hit where both Church and State were weak.

c) Christianity's Role in the Persecution

For years, the responsibility for the Great Hunt has been dumped on the Catholic Church's door-step. 19th century historians ascribed the persecution to religious hysteria. And when Margaret Murray proposed that witches were members of a Pagan sect, popular writers trumpeted that the Great Hunt was not a mere panic, but rather a deliberate attempt to exterminate Christianity's rival religion.

Today, we know that there is absolutely no evidence to support this theory. When the Church was at the height of its power (11th-14th centuries) very few witches died. Persecutions did not reach epidemic levels until after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position as Europe's indisputable moral authority. Moreover most of the killing was done by secular courts. Church courts tried many witches but they usually imposed non-lethal penalties. A witch might be excommunicated, given penance, or imprisoned, but she was rarely killed. The Inquisition almost invariably pardoned any witch who confessed and repented.

Consider the case in York, England, as described by Keith Thomas (Religion and the Decline of Magic). At the height of the Great Hunt (1567-1640) one half of all witchcraft cases brought before church courts were dismissed for lack of evidence. No torture was used, and the accused could clear himself by providing four to eight "compurgators", people who were willing to swear that he wasn't a witch. Only 21% of the cases ended with convictions, and the Church did not impose any kind of corporal or capital punishment.

The vast majority of witches were condemned by secular courts. Ironically, the worst courts were local courts. Some authors, like Anne Llewellyn Barstow (Witchcraze), blame the death toll on the decline of the "community-based" medieval court, and the rise of the centralized "national" court. Nothing could be further from the truth. "Community-based" courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused witches. National courts condemned only about 30% of the accused.

Why were the execution rates so vastly different? Civil courts tended to handle "black" witchcraft cases, trials involving charges of magickal murder, arson, and other violent crimes. Church courts tried more "white" witchcraft: cases of magickal healing, divination, and protective magick. Trial evidence shows that courts always treated healing more leniently than cursing. Additionally, secular and religious courts served two different purposes. Civil courts "protected" society by punishing and killing convicted criminals. In theory, the Church's court system was designed to "save" the criminal -- to make him or her a good Christian once more. Only unrepentant sinners were to be executed. The differences between local and national courts are also easy to explain. Witchcraft cases were usually surrounded by general fear and public protests. "Community-based" courts drew their officials from the community, the group of people affected by this panic. National courts had more distance from the hysteria. Moreover national courts tended to have professional, trained staff -- men who were less likely to discard important legal safeguards in their haste to see "justice" done.

d) The Inquisition

But what of the Inquisition? For many, the "Inquisition" and the "Burning Times" are virtually synonymous. The myth of the witch-hunting inquisition was built on several assumptions and mistakes, all of which have been overturned in the last twenty-five years. First, the myth was the logical extension of 19th century history, which blamed the persecutions on the Catholic Church. If the Church attacked witches, surely the Inquisition would be the hammer She wielded.

Second, a common translation error muddied the waters. Many records simply said that a witch was tried "by inquisition". Some writers assumed that this meant "the" Inquisition. And in some cases it did. But an "inquisition" was also the name of a type of trial used by almost all courts in Europe at the time. Later, when historians examined the records in greater detail, they found that the majority did not involve the Inquisition, merely an inquisition. Today most historians are careful about this, but older and more popular texts (such as Rossell Hope Robbins' Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology) still have the Inquisition killing witches in times and places where it did not even exist.

Third, the only witch-hunting manual most people have seen was written by an inquisitor. In the 1970's, when feminist and Neo-Pagan authors turned their attention to the witch trials, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) was the only manual readily available in translation. Authors naively assumed that the book painted an accurate picture of how the Inquisition tried witches. Heinrich Kramer, the text's demented author, was held up as a typical inquisitor. His rather stunning sexual preoccupations were presented as the Church's "official" position on witchcraft. Actually the Inquisition immediately rejected the legal procedures Kramer recommended and censured the inquisitor himself just a few years after the Malleus was published. Secular courts, not inquisitorial ones, resorted to the Malleus.

As more research was done and historians became more sensitive to the "an inquisition/the Inquisition" error, the inquisitorial witch-hunter began to look like a rare bird. Lamothe-Langon's trials were the last great piece of "evidence", and when they fell, scholars re-examined the Inquisition's role in the Burning Times. What they found was quite startling. In 1258 Pope Alexander IV explicitly refused to allow the Inquisition from investigating charges of witchcraft: "The Inquisitors, deputed to investigate heresy, must not intrude into investigations of divination or sorcery without knowledge of manifest heresy involved." The gloss on this passage explained what "manifest heresy" meant: "praying at the altars of idols, to offer sacrifices, to consult demons, to elicit responses from them... or if [the witches] associate themselves publicly with heretics." In other words, in the 13th century the Church did not consider witches heretics or members of a rival religion.

It wasn't until 1326, almost 100 years later, that the Church reversed its position and allowed the Inquisition to investigate witchcraft. But the only significant contribution that was made was in the development of "demonology", the theory of the diabolic origin of witchcraft. As John Tedeschi demonstrates in his essay "Inquisitorial Law and the Witch" (in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen's Early Modern European Witchcraft) the Inquisition still played a very small role in the persecution. From 1326-1500, few deaths occurred. Richard Kieckhefer (European Witch Trials) found 702 definite executions in all of Europe from 1300-1500; of these, only 137 came from inquisitorial or church courts. By the time that trials were common (early 16th century) the Inquisition focused on the proto-Protestants. When the trials peaked in the 16th and 17th century, the Inquisition was only operating in two countries: Spain and Italy, and both had extremely low death tolls.

In fact, in Spain the Inquisition worked diligently to keep witch trials to a minimum. Around 1609, a French witch-craze triggered a panic in the Basque regions of Spain. Gustav Henningsen (The Witches' Advocate) documented the Inquisition's work in brilliant detail. Although several inquisitors believed the charges, one skeptic convinced La Suprema (the ruling body of the Spanish Inquisition) that this was groundless hysteria. La Suprema responded by issuing an "Edict of Silence" forbidding all discussion of witchcraft. For, as the skeptical inquisitor noted, "There were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about."

The Edict worked, quickly dissipating the panic and accusations. And until the end of the Great Hunt, the Spanish Inquisition insisted that it alone had the right to condemn witches -- which it refused to do. Another craze broke out in Vizcaya, in 1616. When the Inquisition re-issued the Edict of Silence, the secular authorities went over their head and petitioned the king for the right to try witches themselves. The king granted the request, and 289 people were quickly sentenced. Fortunately the Inquisition managed to re-assert its monopoly on trials and dismissed all the charges. The "witches" of Cataluna were not so lucky. Secular authorities managed to execute 300 people before the Inquisition could stop the trials.

e) The Witches

Court records showed that there was no such thing as an "average" witch: there was no characteristic that the majority of witches shared, in all times and plac es. Not gender. Not wealth. Not religion. Nothing. The only thing that united them was the fact that they were accused of witchcraft. The diversity of witches is one of the strongest arguments against the theory that the Great Hunt was a deliberate pogrom aimed at a specific group of people. If that was true, then most witches would have something in common.

We can isolate certain factors that increased a person's odds of being accused. Most witches were women. Many were poor or elderly; many seem to be unmarried. Most were alienated from their neighbors, or seen as "different" and disliked. But there is no evidence that one group was targeted. Traditional magick users might have a slightly higher chance of being accused of witchcraft, but the vast majority of known "white" witches were never charged.

Before trial evidence was available, there were two major theories on who the witches were. Margaret Murray (The Witch Cult in Western Europe and The God of the Witches) proposed that witches were members of a Pagan sect that worshipped the Horned God. Murray's research was exceptionally poor, and occasionally skated into out-right textual manipulation. She restricted her studies to our worst evidence: witch hunting propaganda and trials that involved copious amounts of torture. She then assumed that such evidence was basically accurate, and that the Devil was "really" a Pagan god. None of these assumptions have held up under scrutiny.

In 1973, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English suggested that most witches were mid-wives and female healers. Their book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses convinced many feminists and Pagans that the Great Hunt was a pogrom aimed at traditional women healers. The Church and State sought to break the power of these women by accusing them of witchcraft, driving a wedge of fear between the wise-woman and her clients.

The evidence for this theory was -- and is -- completely anecdotal. Authors cited a number of cases involving healers, then simply assumed that this was what the "average" trial was like. However a mere decade after Witches, Midwives, and Nurses was published, we knew that this was not true. Healers made up a small percentage of the accused, usually between 2% and 20%, depending on the country. There was never a time or a place where the majority of accused witches were healers. In 1990, D. Harley's article, "Historians as demonologists: the myth of the midwife-witch" (in Social History of Medicine 3 (1990), pp. 1-26.) demonstrated that being a licensed midwife actually decreased a woman's changes of being charged.

And there was worse to come. Feminist and Pagan writers presented the healer-witch as the innocent, enlightened victim of the evil male witch hunters. Trials showed that as often as not, the "white" witch was an avid supporter of the "Burning Times." Diane Purkiss (The Witch in History) pointed out that "midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters" than as victims of their inquiries. How did witches become witch-hunters? By blaming illnesses on their rivals. Feminist authors rightly lambasted male doctors who blamed unexplained illnesses on witches. Trial records suggest that this did happen, though not terribly often. If you look at doctors' case books you find that in most cases doctors found natural causes when people thought they were bewitched. When they did diagnose witchcraft, doctors almost never blamed a particular healer or witch. They were trying to explain their failure, not to destroy some individual.

Traditional healers and "white" witches routinely blamed diseases on witchcraft. For a doctor, diagnosing "witchcraft" was admitting failure. Medicine could do nothing against magick, and doctors were loathe to admit that they were powerless against a disease. However baneful magick was the forte of the helpful (or "white" witch). Folk healers regularly blamed illnesses on magick and offered counter-spells to cure their patients. Many were even willing to divine the name of the cursing witch, for a fee.

f) Gender Issues

One basic fact about the Great Witch Hunt stands out: most of the people accused were women. Even during the Hunt itself, commentators noticed this. Some speculated that there were 10,000 female witches for every male witch, and a host of misogynist explanations were trotted out to account for this fact. Later, the predominance of women led some feminists to theorize that "witch" and "woman" were virtually synonymous, that the persecution was caused by Europe's misogyny.

Overall, approximately 75% -80% of the accused were women. However this percentage varied dramatically. In several of the Scandinavian countries, equal numbers of men and women were accused. In Iceland over 90% of the accused were men. Central Europe killed the most witches, and it killed many more women than men -- this is why the overall percentages are so badly skewed.

Proponents of the misogyny theory generally ignore these variations. Many simply do not discuss male witches. One of the most egregious examples comes from Anne Llewellyn Barstow's Witchcraze. Barstow says that Iceland did not have a "real" witch hunt. Now, Iceland killed more witches than Ireland, Russia, and Portugal combined. Barstow claims that all these countries had "real" hunts, and offers no explanation of what made Iceland's deaths "unreal." The only thing I can see is that almost all Icelandic witches were men, and Barstow's theory cannot handle that.

Given the sexism of the times, it's not difficult to find shockingly misogynist witch trials. But misogyny does not explain the trial patterns we see. The beginning and end of the persecution don't correlate to any notable shifts in women's rights. Trials clustered around borders -- are borders more misogynist than interior regions? Ireland killed four witches, Scotland a couple thousand -- are the Scots that much more sexist? Barstow admits that Russia was every bit as misogynist as Germany, yet it killed only ten witches. Her theory can't explain why, and so she simply insists that there were probably lots of other Russian witches killed and they were probably mostly women. We've just lost all the evidence that would support her theory.


From Nine Million to Forty Thousand

The most dramatic changes in our vision of the Great Hunt centered on the death toll. Back before trial surveys were available, estimates of the death toll were almost 100% pure speculation. The only thing our literary evidence told us was that a lot of witches died. Witch hunting propaganda talked about thousands and thousands of executions. Literature focused on crazes, the largest and most sensational trials around. But we had no idea how accurate the literary evidence was, or how common trials actually were. So early death toll estimates, which ranged from several hundred thousand up to a high of nine million, were simply people trying to guess how much "a lot" of witches was.

Today, the process is completely different. Historians begin by counting all the executions/trials listed in an area's court records. Next they estimate how much evidence we've lost: what years and courts we're missing data for. Finally they survey the literary evidence, to see if any large witch trials occurred during the gaps in the evidence. There's still guess-work involved in today's estimates and many areas have not yet been systematically studied. But we now have a solid data-base to build our estimates from, and our figures are getting more specific as further areas are studied.

When the first trial record studies were completed, it was obvious that early estimates were fantastically high. Trial evidence showed that witch crazes were not everyday occurrences, as literature suggested. In fact most countries only had one or two in all of the Great Hunt.

To date, less than 15,000 definite executions have been discovered in all of Europe and America combined. (If you would like a table of the recorded and estimated death tolls throughout Europe, and a full list of the sources for these figures, send me a note at jennyg@compuserve.com.) Even though many records are missing, it is now clear that death tolls higher than 100,000 are not believable.

Three scholars have attempted to calculate the total death toll for the Great Hunt using the new evidence. Brian Levack (The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe) surveyed regional studies and found that there were approximately 110,000 witch trials. Levack focused on recorded trials, not executions, because in many cases we have evidence that a trial occurred but no indication of its outcome. On average, 48% of trials ended in an execution, therefore he estimated that 60,000 witches died. This is slightly higher than 48% to reflect the fact that Germany, the center of the persecution, killed more than 48% of its witches.

Ronald Hutton (The Pagan Religions of the British Isles and "Counting the Witch Hunt", an unpublished essay) used a different methodology. First he surveyed the regional studies and counted up the number of estimated deaths they contained. When he ran into an uncounted area, he looked for a counted area which matched it as closely as possible, in terms of population, culture, and the intensity of witch hunting mentioned in literary evidence. He then assumed that the uncounted area would kill roughly as many witches as the counted area. Using this technique, he estimated that 40,000 witches died in the Great Hunt.

Anne Llewellyn Barstow (Witchcraze) estimated that 100,000 witches died, but her reasoning was flawed. Barstow began with Levack's 60,000 deaths. Then she increased it to 100,000 for two reasons: 1) To compensate for lost records; and 2) Because new trials are still being found.

This may sound reasonable, but it's not. The 110,000 estimated witch trials that Levack based his calculations on already did contain a large allowance for lost records. Barstow was apparently unaware of this, and added more deaths for no good reason. Her point about new trials is true, but irrelevant. Yes, more deaths are being discovered each year. But the more we find, the lower the death toll goes. This makes sense once you understand how historians make their estimates. "New" trials aren't trials we never dreamed existed. They appear when we count areas and courts that haven't been counted before. Historians have always known that our data was imperfect, and they always included estimates for lost trials. So when you find "new" executions, you can't simply add them to the total death toll: you also have to subtract the old estimate they're replacing. And since old estimates were generally far too high, newly "found" trials usually end up lowering the death toll.


Why It Matters

These changes make it critically important to use up-to-date research if you're investigating historical witchcraft. We have perhaps 20 times as much information as we had two decades ago. Witchcraft studies has also become an inter-disciplinary field. Once the domain of historians alone, it now attracts anthropologists and sociologists who offer radically new interpretations of the Great Hunt. Anthropologists point out the ubiquity of witchcraft beliefs, demonstrating that the Great Hunt was not an exclusively European phenomenon. Sociologists draw chilling parallels between the Great Hunt and recent panics over Satanic cults, evidence which hints that we're still not out of the shadow of the Burning Times.

We Neopagans now face a crisis. As new data appeared, historians altered their theories to account for it. We have not. Therefore an enormous gap has opened between the academic and the "average" Pagan view of witchcraft. We continue to use of out-dated and poor writers, like Margaret Murray, Montague Summers, Gerald Gardner, and Jules Michelet. We avoid the somewhat dull academic texts that present solid research, preferring sensational writers who play to our emotions. For example, I have never seen a copy of Brian Levack's The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe in a Pagan bookstore. Yet half the stores I visit carry Anne Llewellyn Barstow's Witchcraze, a deeply flawed book which has been ignored or reviled by most scholarly historians.

We owe it to ourselves to study the Great Hunt more honestly, in more detail, and using the best data available. Dualistic fairy tales of noble witches and evil witch hunters have great emotional appeal, but they blind us to what happened. And what could happen, today. Few Pagans commented on the haunting similarities between the Great Hunt and America's panic over Satanic cults. Scholars noticed it; we didn't. We say "Never again the Burning!" But if we don't know what happened the first time, how are we ever going to prevent it from happening again?



Petr

I recall Petr pasting that exact same article over at OD during its collapse into full-on snake handling.

The point seems to be that the Inquisition was overblown, there were no real tortures or executions to speak of and anyone who says different is a weak, whiny fool not fit to worship the ruff, tuff and well-endowed Christian god. And prolly a damn witch to boot.

So you apparently do not disagree with the facts presented in this article.

And yet you grumble about some non-defined issue.

Sour grapes, Ragno? You don't like seeing false stereotypes about Christianity and "witch holocaust" being overthrown?


Petr

You don't like seeing false stereotypes about Christianity and "witch holocaust" being overthrown?

On the contrary, each time I defeat one of the false sterotypes of the Christian religion which you promulgate, there is general cheering.

It is you who pout when the falsehoods are put down.

WM

Congrats, Winnie.

You managed to put out even more content-free post than Il Ragno.

Perhaps you can intelligently dispute some of the points of this article?


Petr

Perhaps you can intelligently dispute some of the points of this article?
There is no need to, as it:

A.) Is not taken out of a book written by a qualified scholar
B.) Taken out of a relevant referred article.

"Finally, the devilishness of the torture was limited only by Scotland's backward technology in the construction of mechanical devices."

For some reason that one made me roar with laughter ...
Bloody Scots :p

Feeling snobby again Fade, huh?


Petr

Feeling snobby again Fade, huh?
No. As a rule, I simply do not reply to copy and paste off the net. So quote a legitimate source next time.

Fade, if you want I can check out Henry Kamen's book on the Spanish Inquisition, in which he argues that much of its actions were blown way out of proportion.

I've studied witchtrials in legal history class too. Spain was the only country where the Inquisition tried the witches, everywhere else, secular courts prosecuted them. Spain had, proportionally spoken, the fewest executions among convicted witches, and the most acquittals. In those days, the Inquisition and its methods were the court which came closest to what we deem to be due process today.

According to Kamen, the Inquistion burned an average of 4 people per year for a period of 300 years.

Here is some real scholarship on the issue:

It comes from a "hostile source" from a Christian viewpoint - published in a neo-pagan magazine, by a neo-pagan scholar:

http://www.cog.org/witch_hunt.html

"Jenny Gibbons has an M.A. in medieval history and minored in the history of the Great Hunt....

This article originally appeared in issue #5 of the Pomegranate (Lammas, 1998)."

Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt

by Jenny Gibbons


...The vast majority of witches were condemned by secular courts. Ironically, the worst courts were local courts. Some authors, like Anne Llewellyn Barstow (Witchcraze), blame the death toll on the decline of the "community-based" medieval court, and the rise of the centralized "national" court. Nothing could be further from the truth. "Community-based" courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused witches. National courts condemned only about 30% of the accused.

Why were the execution rates so vastly different? Civil courts tended to handle "black" witchcraft cases, trials involving charges of magickal murder, arson, and other violent crimes. Church courts tried more "white" witchcraft: cases of magickal healing, divination, and protective magick. Trial evidence shows that courts always treated healing more leniently than cursing. Additionally, secular and religious courts served two different purposes. Civil courts "protected" society by punishing and killing convicted criminals. In theory, the Church's court system was designed to "save" the criminal -- to make him or her a good Christian once more. Only unrepentant sinners were to be executed. The differences between local and national courts are also easy to explain. Witchcraft cases were usually surrounded by general fear and public protests. "Community-based" courts drew their officials from the community, the group of people affected by this panic. National courts had more distance from the hysteria. Moreover national courts tended to have professional, trained staff -- men who were less likely to discard important legal safeguards in their haste to see "justice" done.

Petr

Jenny G. thus inadvertently explains the discrepancy between the millions of lives lost to witch-hunting according to demographic analysis and the formally recorded cases thereof numbering merely in the hundred(s) (of) thousand(s).

The "local courts" ("often virtual slaughterhouses" - more "likely to discard important legal safeguards") of Jenny's account may be taken, from her own characterization, to be the predecessors of our familiar lynch mobs and kangaroo courts ("surrounded by general fear")- well known to have then existed and having disposed of the "90%"- yet naturally often reluctant and careless of self-documentation for subsequent discovery and possible interpretation as irregular and illegal procedures which would place the prosecutors thereof in jeopardy of national authority jealous of its own prerogatives (as we may take it from related accounts).

So the Zeitgeist of paranoid nonsense regarding witches which the Church not only failed to properly suppress but cultivated to its own purposes is thus the responsibility of the Church, and the millions of victims thereof are to its very account, as charged.

So the Zeitgeist of paranoid nonsense regarding witches which the Church not only failed to properly suppress but cultivated to its own purposes is thus the responsibility of the Church, and the millions of victims thereof are to its very account, as charged.

Well, I think the most important contribution of the Church is that, by glamorizing witchcraft as an immensely powerful and ancient tradition which it would go to any means to stamp out, Wicca is now one of the fastest growing religious practices in the world.

Even better, Wicca is a 'gateway drug' to actual European religion, and many Reconstructionists went through that particular gate.

I have to say, it gives me high hopes for the 24/7 'witchhunt' attitude towards Nazis, with associated propaganda. One day that might put fruit, too.

As Mink Stole says, 'A single bullet can never kill the beauty of fascism!'

As for the apologists, anyone who wishes to may consult the Salem witch trial cases. No amount of figure fiddling will change what we know to be true about the mental and intellectual environment where Xtianty reigns unopposed.

As for the Christian Renaissance in torture, the less said the better.

Wintermute

Jenny G. thus inadvertently explains the discrepancy between the millions of lives lost to witch-hunting according to demographic analysis and the formally recorded cases thereof numbering merely in the hundred(s) (of) thousand(s).

The more I think about this, the more shocking it becomes. To account the total of the 'burning times' at 60,000 - 100,000 because these are the only Church trials that, in addition, we have records of, is unacceptable.

Wintermute

I have to say, it gives me high hopes for the 24/7 'witchhunt' attitude towards Nazis, with associated propaganda. One day that might put fruit, too.

I concur. There is no question in my mind that there is such great power in depictions of NS Germany that deep within the dozing souls of those Whites who see such symbols are, on some level, reading that symbol and what it truly represents. When the times get harder then we shall see.

This present system, or ZOG, as the late Robert Frenz called it, is moribund.
Anything which helps to make it crumble is that which should be encouraged.

The swastika is the symbol of the renaissance of Man.

Have been doing a little research. Two points:

a) That types like Petr are responsible for witchcrazes is easily proved by the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria that swept the United States during the 90s. There are still people imprisoned solely because of the sexual twistedness of Christians. Does anyone recall how children were locked in rooms with Fundamentalist Christians, who would show the children anatomically correct dolls and make suggestions until they would 'spontenously recall' details like underground passageways, cannibalism, elephants, and worse?

I have to say: the modern consensus that fundamentalist Christians are so psychologically twisted by their upbringings and belief systems that they are compelled to both project these forbidden contents onto others and then to punish them, is unquestionable. The modern fundamentalist who will not rest until the child reflects his own diseased inner world of sexualized torture and abomination is just the same as the Inquisitor who will not stop torturing a woman until she starts spouting the 'correct' details, such as those regarding the devil's huge, scaly, and icy cold penis.

In both cases, that of the cannibalism, tunnels, and elephants, and also that of the devils appendandage, we are seeing the Giger-esque inner world of the Christian projected outward, where it can be tortured.

That others should suffer for their sins is confirmed by their morally corrosive doctrine of 'substitute atonement', for which they were rightly mocked by the Pagans.

b)Petr, in his Christian fashion, fails to inform us that the Pomegranate, in addition to running letters scoring excellent points against his article, also ran a rather lengthy debunking, which I reproduce in part below for the benefit of the gallery.

His deliberate mishandling of evidence should be noted by everyone here.

Wintermute

http://chass.colostate-pueblo.edu/natrel/pom/old/POM9a3.html

THE FIRST WITCH HUNTS
The 'new chronology' replaces one mythology with another. The old mythology said that the witch hunts happened in the Middle Ages. The new academic mythology insists that no significant witch hunting happened until early modern times. Robin Briggs claims that there was "no risk" of witch burnings before the 14th century because "until then the relative skepticism of the ruling elites, together with the nature of the legal system, excluded the possibility" (Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, 397). Many writers equate witch trials with diabolist trials, going so far as to say that no 'real' witch trials occurred until the 1400s. This, and their failure to analyze the nature of the information we have about medieval witch persecutions, is profoundly anti-historical.


Feminist historians have been pointing out for a couple of decades that the Renaissance inaugurated the worst witch hunts, but it is also clear that these grew out of an earlier history. Laws empowering kings and lords to persecute witches were enacted throughout western Europe from the early feudal era. The earliest barbarian codes, such as the first Salic law, were more concerned with punishing defamation as witches than with witches themselves. Those who committed magical harm paid a fine, the same as for a physical attack. The Norse codes treated sorcery similarly.


Under christianization, Roman law was brought into play, and burning at the stake appeared. A late recension of the Salic law ordered burning for those who killed with incantations. Roman law heavily influenced the Visigothic code, which ordered burning at the stake for worshipping 'demons,' and flogging and enslavement for diviners and other witches. The Lex Rotharii of north Italy forbade witch-burning, but allowed lords to kill their (female) subjects as witches.


Bishops at the Council of Paris (825) called for rulers to "punish pitilessly" witches, diviners, and enchanters who practiced "very certainly the remains of the pagan cult" (de Cauzons, 118). In 873, the French king Charles the Bald issued new laws ordering all counts of the realm to hunt down and execute sorcerers and witches in their domains "with the greatest possible diligence" (Quierzy-sur-Oise statutes, in Russell, 73). Alfred 'the Great' decreed death, exile or heavy fines for witches and diviners, and of women who consulted charmers and magicians, added: "Do not let them live." These provisions were repeated by Edward and Guthram; then Ethelred ordered witches exiled; but Ethelstan (928) renewed the call for them to be burned at the stake (Ewen, 3-4).


I see no reason to assume that these laws went unheeded and unused. Manorial lords acting as haut-justiciers did not keep records of trials, and very few records of any kind survive from this period they call the Dark Ages. Chroniclers mention witch-executions, such as the women tortured by aristocrats into saying that they had bewitched count Guillaume of Angouleme in 1027, or the executions of Sagae (wisewomen) by Wratislaw II of Bohemia and his brother, the bishop of Prague, in 1080 (Fournier, 63-65; Lea, 1280). Around 1100 Caesarius of Heisterbach reported that judges had witches and wizards burned at Soest in Westphalia (Grimm, Jacob, Teutonic Mythology, tr., James S. Stallybrass, London: George Bell& Sons, 1883, p 1622). Thirty were burned at Graz in eastern Austria in 1115 (Russel, 321, fn 20-1). The Arab trader Abu Hamid al-Gharnati wrote in 1153 that the Kievans accused old women of witchcraft "about every twenty years," and subjected them to the water ordeal. "Those who float are called witches and burned " (Klaniczay, Magie et Sorcellerie, 217).


Burning seems to originate with the Romans, but witch-executions by drowning are also attested. Chronicles say the Frankish prince Lothair drowned the lady Gerberga as a witch in a river, "as is customary with sorcerers." (Fournier, 63) In 970, an English widow was drowned as a witch at London bridge (and her male accuser thereby succeeded in seizing her property, a theme reprised some 700 years later). (Crawford, Jane, "Witchcraft in Anglo-Saxon England," (1963) in Levack, Brian, ed., Witchcraft in the Ancient World and Middle Ages (1992), p 167). Bishop Serapion reported Russian witch-drownings in the 1270s, and other Russian witch executions are recorded for the 11th to 13th centuries (see Zguta, Russell, "Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia" American Historical Review, December, 1977).


The Spanish reiterated their witch laws in the 11th to 13th centuries, adjudicated by the ordeal of red-hot iron. Fuero Cuenca is typical: "A woman who is a witch or sorceress shall either be burnt or saved by iron" (II, 1, 35, in Baroja, 82). Females are the stated targets, and the laws treated the minority of men entangled in sorcery trials with unambiguous favoritism.

The Forum Turolii code (1176) ordered female witches to be burned, but shaved a cross on the men's heads, scourged them and banished them (Wedeck, Harry E., A Treasury of Witchcraft: A Sourcebook of the Magic Arts, Citadel Press, NY 1970, p 257). Spanish women were subject to the ordeal of incandescent iron, which was used to test female chastity and fidelity, establish paternity, and determine whether a woman had induced abortions, cast spells or prepared potions (see Heath Dillard's excellent discussion of these issues in "Women in Reconquest Castile," in Women in Medieval Society, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard, U of Pennsylvania Press, 1976. In some corners of Europe, such as Transylvania, insubordinate male serfs were also put through this ordeal). The ordeal of iron was also used as a sexual trial for German women in the same period, as well as in witch trials in 13th century England and the Black Forest in the 15th century.


Witch persecution was reaffirmed by urban communes in Italy, as in the municipal laws of Venice (1181) and later, Florence, Padua and other cities. German magistrates followed suit. The Sachsenspiegel (1225) and Schwabenspiegel (1275) prescribed burning at the stake for witches, then Hamburg, Goslar, Berlin, Groningen and Bremen. The Norman kings of Sicily and England decreed laws against witches, including Henry I and Edward I, who called for burning. This penalty was reiterated in the Fleta code toward the end of the 1200s and in the Britton code a few decades later. The Treuga Henrici (1224) ordered burnings of "heretics, enchanters and sorcerers" in the German empire (Cauzons, 212). Many more laws were passed across western Europe during the 1300s.


When Pope Innocent IV gave his blessing to inquisitorial torture in the 1252 bull Ad Extirpanda, he called on rulers to punish heretics "as if they were sorcerers" (Lea, 431). The Pope was addressing people still accustomed to thinking of the stake as a punishment for witchcraft, and so referred to the long-standing precedent of feudal witch-burning as a model for the repression of heresy.


This brief summary of early witch persecutions sketches their importance as a foundation for the mass hunts. The elements of sex, class and pagan content already figure in strongly. This early data also raises questions about the numbers which have been so confidently declared as the maximum of witch-executions. I don't find an argument from silence convincing, since documentation for this period is so sparse, and manorial trials (and even municipal ones) nearly invisible in the historical record.
In the late middle ages, a sea change took place as diabolism was injected into the witch persecutions. This ideology originated among theologians and scholastics, with a hefty helping of Roman-era themes of orgies, unguents, and baby-killing. Imposed by church and state over a period of centuries, against considerable resistance, it became the crucial ingredient in forging the mass hunts. The blood libel in particular was the wedge that shattered the historic solidarity of the common people against elite repression of their culture(s).


There is much more to be said about the evolution of diabolist hunts in the 1300s than I have space to discuss here. Hansen rightly pointed to the western Alpine countries as the early crucible of diabolist witch trials. Ginsburg has contributed an important part of the puzzle: how the scapegoating of Jews and lepers, with charges of poison powders and blood libel, spread and evolved into diabolist persecutions of 'sects' of witches. More remains to be uncovered about how these secular witch hunts in Dauphiné, Savoy and Valais were related to the intensive inquisitorial purges (backed up by invading armies) in the same region during the 14th century. It's critical to note that these repressions were propelled by elite powers and interests.


Popular resistance to the clergy's repression of their folk rites and healers comes into focus in the sermons of the famous preacher Bern-ardino da Siena. In 1427, this 'saint' used inflammatory charges of baby-murder to turn people against their traditional folk healers, which he called femmine indiavolate, 'devil-ridden women.' He deplored Romans' disbelief of his stories about witches ("what I said was to them as if I was dreaming") and the fact that the Sienese chose to "help and pray for" witches denounced to the secular lord. Bernardino implored his audience to denounce the witches, not to feel sympathy for a woman who (he claimed) had diabolically killed twenty or thirty babies: "If it happened to you, that she had killed one of your children, how would that look to you? Think of others!"


Fra Bernardino told people that it was their duty to denounce all suspected witches to the Inquisition right away; otherwise they would have to answer for it on Judgement Day. After a series of these incendiary sermons in 1427, so many people were reported as incantatori and streghe that the friar had to consult with the Pope about how to handle all the denunciations pouring in. Their solution is typical of witch-hunting illogic: they decided to arrest those accused of the worst crimes. So those whose enemies told the tallest tales were burned (Bonomo, 262-3).

WITCH HUNTING INQUISITORS
Jenny Gibbons writes of 'the myth of the witch-hunting Inquisition,' repudiating the 19th century historians who pointed to papal inquisitors' role in inflating witch persecution into a craze. Unfortunately, she doesn't address the solid evidence assembled by those historians -- notably Henry Charles Lea and Joseph Hansen -- of inquisitorial hunts in northern Italy, eastern France and the Rhineland during the 1400s and early 1500s. Lea can be excused for including the Lamothe-Langon fabrications, since this forgery was not exposed until a century later. But its misinformation was far from being "the last great piece of 'evidence'" of witch-hunting inquisitors, as Gibbons claims.
In 1258 Alexander IV denied inquisitors' petition for authority to try divination and sorcery cases, limiting them to cases manifestly savoring of heresy. However, it didn't take inquisitors of a demonological bent long to invent pretexts to work around the papal ruling. Only forty years later, canonist Johannes Andreae added a gloss that effectively nullified it: "Those are to be called heretics who forsake God and seek the aid of the devil." He broadened the definition of heretical sorcery to include pagan prayer, offerings and divinations (all demonized, of course) as well as sorcery based on christian symbolism (see Russell, 174; and Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law, 131).


The trend of redefining witchcraft as heretical grew in various inquisitorial manuals of 1270, 1320, and 1367. A shift occurred in the later 1300s, as the relatively sedate attitude to folk witchcraft visible in Gui's 1320 manual gave way to Eymeric's scholastic diabolism in 1367, and to the first recorded inquisitorial witch burnings a few decades later. The bishops' centuries-long campaign against pagan observances was seen as manifestly ineffectual, and the more militant inquisitors were eager to take a turn. To ensure their jurisdiction, they claimed that a dangerous 'new heresy' of devil-worshipping witches had arisen and was threatening christendom.


Almost all the demonologies of the 1400s and early 1500s were written by inquisitors, who often refer to witch trials that they or other inquisitors conducted. The formative diabolist literature was penned by Dominican inquisitors, including Eymeric, Nider, Vineti, Jacquerius, Visconti, de Spina, Prieiras and Rategno, as well as Kramer and Sprenger. Their books build on the demonological framework laid by scholastic theologians and by papal bulls like Gregory IX's 1233 Vox in Rama (which attacked insurgent peasants as devil-worshipping heretics led by 'sibyls'). Inquisitor Etienne de Bourbon tried witches in the early decades of the Inquisition, using the same diabolist paradigm as Gregory: a devilish black cat presiding over orgies, while his colleague Bernard de Caux tried a woman in 1245 for healing and 'other sorceries.' But there is no evidence of executions in these early trials, and records of (Inquisition) witch executions only begin to appear in the late 1300s.


In 1385, inquisitor Antonio da Savigliano was already blending witchcraft with heresy in trials at Pignarolo and Turin. Inquisitors at Milan tried Sibilla Zanni and Pierina de' Bugatis as witches in 1384 and burned them for relapse four years later (their testimony was loaded with pagan content, revolving around a goddess who revealed the secrets of nature and revived the animals the witches feasted on). Other trials were going on in this period, according to Bernardo Rategno, inquisitor at Como, who wrote in 1508 that "the sect of witches began to pullulate only within the last 150 years, as appears from the old records of trials by inquisitors of our Inquisition at Como" (Tractatus de Strigiis, cited in Bonomo and Ginsberg). These records do not seem to have survived -- though Ginsberg points out that scholars have not been allowed to examine the Como archives -- but such testimony points to early Inquisition persecutions. The diabolist inquisitor Prieiras made a parallel comment, dating the 'witch sect' back to 1404.


By this time witchcraft-minded inquisitors clearly had papal support. In 1409 Pope Alexander V commissioned Pons Feugeyron to prosecute people spreading "new sects and forbidden rites," who practiced "witchcraft, soothsaying, invocations to the devil, magic spells, superstition, forbidden and pernicious arts." In 1437 Eugenius IV issued a bull to all inquisitors authorizing them to prosecute people for sorcery: not just magical harm-doing, but also divination, healing, weather-witching, and adoration of 'demons' (Lea, 224). In 1451 Nicholas V authorized the head inquisitor of France to prosecute diviners and to punish those who spoke ill of this bull as rebels (Cauzons, 409). Some years later, Calixtus III ordered witch-inquisitions in numerous cities of northern Italy. The 1484 Hexenbulle of Innocent VIII clearly had its precedents. Papal calls for witch-inquisitions accelerated and continued through most of the next century.


Some of the most severe witch hunts of the 1400s were carried out by Italian inquisitors in the alpine foothills, at Como, Bergamo, Valtellina, Mendrisio, Turin, and in Piemonte. They were already raging by mid-century. In 1484, the inquisitor of Como carried out mass arrests of witches, so many that secular officials warned him not to overdo it. Popular memory still recalls 1484 as a year of burnings. The following year, 41 witches were burned in nearby Bormio. Other burnings took place at Milan, where few documents have survived. But these burnings were numerous enough to provoke a rebellion in 1516, when peasants protesting inquisitorial witch hunts brought them to a temporary halt. In 1518, at the other end of the Alps, inquisitors burned eighty witches in Val Camonica, 'valley of the witches,' and informed the Senate of Venice that another 70 were in prison, while 5,000 more were suspected. Inquisitors also had a large number burned at Bologna in 1523, where Pico della Mirandola wrote that executions went on daily, under mounting protests (see Bonomo for a fuller description of these Italian hunts; also Ermanno Paccagnini's In Materie de Stregarie, 1989).


Savoy was another epicenter, and western Switzerland, especially by inquisitors at Vevey and Neuchatel around 1437-42. Among those arrested in France in the 1430s were two women who defended the memory of Jeanne d'Arc -- whose burning inquisitors had collaborated in -- and the one who refused to recant was burned (this is according to Nider's Formicarius, which refers to other witch trials by an inquisitor at Evian). In northern France during the mid 1400s, inquisitors Nicholas Jacquier and Pierre le Broussard hunted witches, as well as an unnamed inquisitor of Artois, and others active at Dijon and Lyons in Burgundy from 1460 to about 1480. German inquisitors tried witches at Thalheim and Heidelburg between 1446-75.
In the early 1500s, Inquisition witch trials took place in the Rhineland and over much of eastern France and northern Italy, as well as in Navarra, Catalunya and Aragón. The feminist-humanist Agrippa was forced into exile from Metz in 1519 after intervening to save an accused witch (the only evidence against her was that her mother had been burned as a witch). Inquisitor Nicholas Savin lost no time in torturing and burning another woman. Agrippa later described the inquisitors as "rapacious wolves" and "vultures gorged with human blood" (Lea, 545; Bonomo, 247-8).

REHABILITATING THE INQUISITION
Edward Peters' influential book Inquisition omits all mention of inquisitorial witch trials (the bias of this author is best illustrated by his description of heresy as 'theological crime' -- a worthy companion to Orwellian 'thought crime'). Peters employs a clever leger-de-main to avoid describing witch trials by papal inquisitors; just as his narrative arrives at the cusp of these persecutions, he skips over to deal with the (state-run) Spanish Inquisition. When he returns, it is only to describe details of how the papal Inquisition was reformed into the Roman Inquisition (in 1540). In this way, he nimbly side-steps the diabolist witch frenzy of papal inquisitors in the 1400s and early 1500s, which shaped the ideology, methods, and course of the witch craze, including the secular trials.


Surprisingly, Peters' complete omission of any discussion of inquisitorial witch hunts has been adopted wholesale. Many writers ignore the 15th century and early 16th century trials and literature, without ever bothering to critique what has been written about them previously. Under this new orthodoxy, it no longer seems to be considered necessary to discuss the role of diabolism, or any period other than the height of the Burning Terror. Discussion can then focus on the less severe procedures of the post-1600 inquisitors, and even praise their relative 'lenience.' However, this approach begs the question of their original role in fueling the hunts.


The generalizations drawn from this narrowed focus are false, or at best, misleading. Gibbons states that, "The Inquisition almost invariably pardoned any witch who confessed and repented." This was just not true in the 1400s and early 1500s. Church law required that a witch who 'confessed' (said what the inquisitors wanted) be spared from death -- the first time. If she was arrested again, she was burned as a relapsed heretic. This became a common pattern: once accused and tried, a 'witch' was likely to be suspected and denounced again. In practice, a second arrest was not necessary for a burning; if the witch retracted a 'confession' obtained under torture, she could be treated as relapsed.


The fiction that 'the Church abhors blood' required that those convicted by the Inquisition be turned over to 'the secular arm' for execution. Its charade of recommending mercy was sometimes exposed when civil authorities balked at carrying out the execution, as when the mayor of Brescia refused to burn witches condemned by inquisitors in 1486, or in 1521, when the Venetian government blocked the burning of more witches. The Pope became furious that the expected death sentences were not carried out (Lea's account of these events is still well worth reading).


Even in the 1600s, it is inaccurate to say witches were 'pardoned.' Exile was a common penalty in both Italy and Spain (and especially dangerous for women). The Spanish also flogged 'witches' with 30 or 100 or 200 lashes (the latter penalty being common) and sentenced them to jails and workhouses (Cirac Estopañan, 230-46). Other penalties subjected the 'witches' to a public spectacle of humiliation and injury: they were forced to ride backwards on an ass, naked to the waist, wearing mitres painted with devils while the mob swarmed around, shouting insults and throwing stones and filth at them.


What's more, the Spanish Inquisition increased its witch trials from 1615-1700, and Portugal from 1700-1760 (Bethancourt, MSE, 186-7). Both Iberian Inquisitions were actively repressing pagan Indian and African religions in Latin America during the same period, using the same diabolist models as in Europe (see especially Laura De Mello Souza's, O Diablo e a Terra de Santa Cruz: Feitiçaria e Religiosidade Popular no Brasil Colonial, São Paolo: 1987 (Companhia das Letras) and Silverblatt, Irene, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru, Princeton UP, 1987).


How 'lenient' the methods of the Roman Inquisition had been can be gauged from a document attempting to reform witch trial procedure as late as 1623: "The gravest errors in trials for witchcraft are daily committed by inquisitors, so that the Inquisition has scarcely found one trial conducted legally, with women (emphasis added) convicted on the most slender evidence, with confessions extorted by legal means, and has had to punish its judges for inflicting excessive tortures" (Robbins, Russell Hope, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, New York: Crown, 1959, p 269). Even after this, torture remained a factor, though more restricted, and death in prison a possible outcome.


RELIABILITY OF TRIAL RECORDS
Jenny Gibbons asserts that the trial sources come from "people who knew what actually happened" and who had "less reason to lie." I find this disingenuous. These records were produced by judges who presided over torture trials, attempting to extract from accused witches 'confessions' in line with diabolist doctrine. Their hunts were based on lies: that witches had sex with devils, murdered and ate babies, made powders to cause disease or hail. The defendant had to lie to stop the torture, then repeat the lies at the stake, (or assent to the lies being read out) in order to receive the favor of being strangled before burning.


The assumption that "trial records addressed the full range of trials " is seriously flawed. In country after country, specialists note that trial records only began to be kept after a certain time -- before that, there is little or nothing. Even afterwards, the archives are notoriously riddled with lacunae. Records for entire cities, counties or regions are often missing. Gibbons rightly praises Ewen's scholarship, but overlooks his point that judicial records only begin to be sent to the royal archives in the 1330s, and much later (or never) for many counties. Even for the 1400s, wrote Ewen, the Public Record Office contains few records of assizes, and many later judicial documents were destroyed: "For the reign of Henry VIII practically nothing has been preserved (and for Elizabeth) the bulk has been destroyed" (Ewen, 40, 102-9, 71).


This pattern repeats itself in studies of most countries, with no records available until early modern times: 1576 in Denmark; the 1590s in Norway; the 1630s for Latvia -- and even these are thin and incomplete. For Hungary, Gabor Klaniczay notes that "The loss of complete series of court records is especially frequent for the period before 1690 " He concludes that lynchings were a frequent occurrence during the Turkish occupation (EMod, 221).
In Savoy, Brocard-Plaut observes that that out of 800 trials cited by two judges of the period 1560 to 1674, only 40% appear on record. She states that many documents have been destroyed -- not least because of the Savoyard practice of hanging the court record around the victim's neck before burning (Brocard, 153). In the Swiss Jura, judicial records are missing but burnings are visible in fiscal accountings for loads of wood, tar and executioners' fees. Monter writes that " even when the records seem to be in fairly good condition, as for 17th century Valangin, the chance discovery of a parallel source can double the number of known trials for a particular decade." He adds that the gaps in the prison registers often occur in years known to have experienced "extremely heavy waves of trials throughout the canton" (Monter, 91).


Inquisition documents for entire periods appear to have been destroyed, as intimated by Bernardo Rategno's 1508 reference to inquisitorial records of Italian witch trials from the mid-1300s, no longer extant. Local inquisitorial archives for Venice, Aquilea, and Naples are full of gaps, according to Bethancourt, who refers to a "massive loss of the trials " (Magie et Sorcellerie, 187-90). Of Italian cities, only Reggio Emilio has complete inquisitorial archives and many others, none at all (Romeo, Giovanni, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell'Italia della Controriforma, Florence: 1990 (Sansoni Editore), 53). An unknown number of records were lost after Napoleon carried off the papal Inquisition's archives.


Political reasons sometimes account for incomplete record-keeping and deliberate destruction of records. Secular officials in the Basque country, for example, pursued hunts in defiance of the Inquisition's belated attempts to brake them. In France, 17th-century trial records were destroyed on a grand scale after local courts defied the central government in pursuing witch trials. Robert Mandrou notes large gaps in the Toulouse archives, with "only a few traces" of trials during the worst craze periods, when one lawyer wrote that its Parlement was dealing with cases 'daily.' The skimpy 17th-century court records of Bordeaux -- missing cases known from other sources and with no record of the 'innumerable' mass trials of 1643-45 -- are easily explained; its parlement burned its secret registries in 1710. Pau, another southwestern capital where witch hunts were intense, also burned all of its Archives du Parlement shortly after 1700. (Mandrou, 19, 377-84) Mandrou also describes how freelance witch-finders ravaged the provincial hinterlands in 1620-1650, leaving no judicial traces. The French hunts are possibly the most underestimated witch hunts in Europe.


These massive, systemic gaps make me extremely skeptical of the conservative estimates -- 20,000 to 40,000, or even 10,000 -- now being advanced by some writers as the toll of witch hunt dead. Their adjustments for unrecorded executions are based on theoretical speculation and shaky assumptions (not least, the claim that deaths before 1400 were negligible). Historians have a tendency to be ruled by the nature of available documentation, which in this case is demonstrably flawed and incomplete. I appreciate that the popular figure of nine million burned is mythical, though my own count would have to include those who were drowned, branded, beaten, fined, imprisoned, scored, exiled, shunned, expropriated and deprived of their livelihoods. This much is certain: no one knows how many were killed.

In those days, the Inquisition and its methods were the court which came closest to what we deem to be due process today.

You and I obviously have widely differing notions of what constitutes 'due process'.

http://www.borndigital.com/pear.jpghttp://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/balloon/99/siena/img/tort7.jpg

"They are forced into the mouth, rectum, or vagina of the victim and there expanded by force of the screw to the maximum aperture of their segments. The inside of the cavity in question is irremediably mutilated, nearly always fatally so. The pointed prongs at the end of the seqments serve better to rip into the throat, the intestines or the cervix."

WM

"They are forced into the mouth, rectum, or vagina of the victim and there expanded by force of the screw to the maximum aperture of their segments. The inside of the cavity in question is irremediably mutilated, nearly always fatally so. The pointed prongs at the end of the seqments serve better to rip into the throat, the intestines or the cervix."

WM

Do we not, Brother W, shamelessly flatter the Christians by suggesting a parallel with mere Bolshevism?

At least the field interrogations conducted by Spetsnaz (driving nails into living skulls) and the exemplary live cremations of "'traitors" are not without rational foundation.

"Political reasons sometimes account for incomplete record-keeping and deliberate destruction of records. Secular officials in the Basque country, for example, pursued hunts in defiance of the Inquisition's belated attempts to brake them. In France, 17th-century trial records were destroyed on a grand scale after local courts defied the central government in pursuing witch trials. Robert Mandrou notes large gaps in the Toulouse archives, with "only a few traces" of trials during the worst craze periods, when one lawyer wrote that its Parlement was dealing with cases 'daily.' The skimpy 17th-century court records of Bordeaux -- missing cases known from other sources and with no record of the 'innumerable' mass trials of 1643-45 -- are easily explained; its parlement burned its secret registries in 1710. Pau, another southwestern capital where witch hunts were intense, also burned all of its Archives du Parlement shortly after 1700. (Mandrou, 19, 377-84) Mandrou also describes how freelance witch-finders ravaged the provincial hinterlands in 1620-1650, leaving no judicial traces. The French hunts are possibly the most underestimated witch hunts in Europe."

NN:

The similarities of the "Great Hunt" with the "Holocaust" are striking.

The similarities of the "Great Hunt" with the "Holocaust" are striking.

Only superficially. The initial overblown estimation of 9 million was made in the 18th century, by scholars using historiographic means available to them at the time. It was not made or used in a demagogic fashion.

The downsizing of these claims, as Petr shows, comes from Wiccan and not Christian sources. However, even Wiccan revisions to the body counts do not attempt to revise the stated reason for persecution or its methods.

Secondly, the 'Holocaust' misrepresents the actions of Germans as exterminationist in nature and absolute in scope. It also presents blatantly false claims about people being burned alive and gas chambers.

Claims about the burning, torture, drowning, branding, and beating of suspected witches, on the other hand, are well documented.

We have no record of Germans destroying records, which we do have in the case of witch hunts. Therfore, there is every reason to believe that the Witch Hunts did exist, and were persued for the reasons that modern history states.

Contemporary German sources show an interest in relocating their Jews to Madagascar, Uganda or Palestine, and much money and material were apportioned to teach Jews agricultural skills they would need in their new homes. Vast tracts of land in Czechoslovakia were set aside for this purpose.

The evidence in the Holocaust debate, that no contemporary Soviet, British, or American source was aware of any 'Holocaust' is very telling, and supports my point that the Witch Hunt and the Holocaust, as historical narratives, are very different.

Finally, Allied information sources continue to quash any discussion of heroic efforts Germans took to save Jewish internees in the face of epidemics and food shortages caused by an infrastructure destroying carpet bombing campaign that was going on at the time. Are you asserting that some extenuating information about Christian authorities ('secular' or otherwise) of the time in question?

If so, bring it forward, and we will consider it.

Wintermute

- "The initial overblown estimation of 9 million was made in the 18th century, by scholars using historiographic means available to them at the time. It was not made or used in a demagogic fashion."


Regardless of the truthfulness of this claim, all kinds of anti-Christian weirdos still uncritically spout these multi-million figures...

... including our very own NN the Clueless.


Petr

You and I obviously have widely differing notions of what constitutes 'due process'.



"They are forced into the mouth, rectum, or vagina of the victim and there expanded by force of the screw to the maximum aperture of their segments. The inside of the cavity in question is irremediably mutilated, nearly always fatally so. The pointed prongs at the end of the seqments serve better to rip into the throat, the intestines or the cervix."

WM
Not at all. I never argued that the procedures the Inquisition applied came even close to what we consider due process today, I argued they came closer than anything else in those days. When torturing someone in order to obtain a confession for example, the rule was that you never ever left physical harm on the person (no scar, no defective limbs, nothing like that), and that the suspect repeated his confession after the torture had ended. The Inquisition respected that rule at all times, the secular courts (which were manned with illiterate yokels and drunken brutes) have a less clean record. The Inquisition pardoned first time offenders who repented, unlike their secular counterparts. The only educated people with even a wee bit of common sense to magistrate over common people in those days, were the cleric magistrates in the Inquisition.

Another excerpt:

"The Inquisition was endowed with exceptional powers. It followed no rules of evidence; it rejected the basic principle of Anglo-Saxon common law that a man is innocent until the prosecution proves him guilty, it allowed no denial to be entered nor legal representation, and worst of all even when it proved to its own satisfaction that a victim was guilty, he or she could not be executed until a full confession had been made. If a confession was not voluntarily offered it had authority to extract one by torture, and this it did not hesitate to do, using the foulest means. After confession the most painful of all deaths, the penalty for heresy, burning alive at the stake, gave the alleged witch happier release.

Between 1450 and 1750 hundreds of thousands of men and women in Europe met their deaths at the executioner's hands, victims of the witch-hunters. Witchcraft persecution swept over the continent in recurrent waves. In some countries the campaigns against witchcraft were waged more fiercely than in others. In Germany more than 100,000 men, women and young children in their teens, and not yet in them, died for alleged witchcraft in the 300 years of our period. In France, when the peak of the delusion was reached between 1575 and 1625, it is estimated that the figure is almost as great. The Attorney General of Lorraine, Nicholas Rémy, personally sentanced 900 to death between 1581 and 1591, while two decades later Judge Pierre de Lancre, sent to the Pays de Labourd, in the Basque country, to investigate rumours of witchcraft, found all 30,000 of the inhabitants infected with witchcraft and boasted that he sent 600 to the stake in four months.

On the other hand, it must not be thought that the Inquisition and the Roman Catholic Church were alone responsible for these sickening wholesale slaughters. The Protestant German states were no less ardent in their pursuit of witches. Though the basis of the Calvinist charge was not heresy, the methods used -- with certain local variations at the whim of petty rulers -- differed little from those of the Inquisition. This persecution found its justification in the injunction in Exodus xxii, 18, "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.' On the other hand, the absence of the heretical element did not save the victim from torture or burning, though large numbers were hanged, or strangled and burned, or, if the executioner were an ingenious man, by a special method, such as, for example, the oven invented by the executioner of Neisse, in Silesia, in which, in 1651, he roasted forty-two women and young girls, and in the next nine years raised the total to over a thousand, many of whom were young children of three and four years of age.

The motivation of the Calvinist obedience to the Divine command was a real fear of the Devil. The extreme Protestants believed in the personification of evil in the shape of Satan as strenuously as did the Catholics, if not more so. Indeed from my own personal experience of Calvinism as a child I would defend a thesis that the Devil looms more largely in the religion of Geneva than does God. Every pleasurable discovery, both physical and cerebral, which I made before the age of nine was immediantly transformed into guilt -- by the general designation of all pleasure as sinful -- and into sins of commission by the particular interpretation of my father that the enjoyment of a glass of cold water on a hot day was the beginning of a move in the Devil's game of temptation chess, which he spends the whole of his time playing, using the intervals between moves for ensnaring the whole world in the fires of Hell, except those (all of them Calvinists) who are endowed by Irresistable Grae and automatically Predestined for Heaven. The omnipresence with which Calvinists endowed the Devil, in fact, equated witchcraft with the heresy that Roman Catholics interpreted it as being."

Ronald Seth, In The Name of the Devil, pp.6-8

More on English witchcraft here:

"The Witchcraft Act of 1563 made witchcraft a felony, but its provisions, in comparison with James I's enactment and with the continental laws, were lenient. The death penalty -- hanging -- was invoked only if death had resulted from alleged witchcraft practices. In other words, witchcraft was placed on a par with murder. The guilty man or woman was hanged only if the court was satisfied that an unlawful killing had been proved. In other cases, for example, 'wasting', laming and the destruction of food and chattels, including animals, by the casting of spells, the accused, if found guilty was subject only to a penalty of one year's imprisonment and apperances, usually four, in the pillory, provided it was his or her first offence. However, 'if any person or persons, being once convicted of the same offence, as is foresaid, do eftsoons perpetrate and commit the like offence, that then every such offender, being thereof the second time convicted as is foresaid, shall forfeit unto the Queen's majesty, her heir and successors, all his goods and chattels and suffer imprisonment for life'.

One can, with some justification, maintain that the authors of the Bill were predominantly intent upon protecting the Queen from plots against her life and throne; plots, that is, of the same kind where were responsible for the witchcraft causes célèbres of pre-Tudor days. There was scarcely a time in the course of her long reign when Elizabeth was not the object of such conspiracies, and though in the famous plots which were uncovered before any damage was done -- for example, Babington's and Ridofli's plots -- witchcraft was not charged, it was felt useful to have such a law on the Statute Book, both to act as a deterrent and to be invoked should the need arise. . .

TBC

Ibid., pp.10-11

It followed no rules of evidence; it rejected the basic principle of Anglo-Saxon common law that a man is innocent until the prosecution proves him guilty, it allowed no denial to be entered nor legal representation, and worst of all even when it proved to its own satisfaction that a victim was guilty, he or she could not be executed until a full confession had been made. If a confession was not voluntarily offered it had authority to extract one by torture, and this it did not hesitate to do, using the foulest means. After confession the most painful of all deaths, the penalty for heresy, burning alive at the stake, gave the alleged witch happier release.

I agree with the characterization of the Inquisition; despite the apologists here, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the ferocity, ill-will, and twistedness of the standard Inquisitor.

On the other hand, it seems a bit much to say they "rejected the basic principles of Anglo-Saxon common law". Exactly when did they accept these principles? It seems unfair, even from this historical distance, to claim them as apostates to human decency or common sense; they never signed on to such notions in the first place.

Indeed from my own personal experience of Calvinism as a child I would defend a thesis that the Devil looms more largely in the religion of Geneva than does God. Every pleasurable discovery, both physical and cerebral, which I made before the age of nine was immediantly transformed into guilt -- by the general designation of all pleasure as sinful --

It is hardly specific to Calvinists; anyone who has met or spent any time with Christians who take the Old Testament seriously as a spiritual document can agree that such people are far more likely to a)throw their support behind, or create, disastrous social movemets, such as Prohibition or relocating the population of Somalia to the United States b)to hate learning c)to hate the body, pleasure and sex d)to act without conscience, on account of their own notion of chosenness e)to never be swayed by facts, no matter how overwhelming f)to be especially persecutory with children, verging on the abusive g)to take great glee from holding flatly nonsensical opinions, such as the young earth theory f)to be more than usually uncomfortable with homosexuality g)to take especial joy and to gloat inhumanly at the spectacle of another's suffering h)to feel that all suffering is punishment for sin i)to be unnaturally interested in the private lives of others j)to feel ecstatic release at the confession of guilt k)to be subject to strong feelings of inferiority l)to be miserly m)to be quick to anger n)to be incapable of understanding inconsistencies in Scripture o)to understand metaphorical approaches to Scripture p)to hold absolutely incommeasurealbe opinions, such as their own opposition to abortion as compared to the OT's opinion, where a fetus is explicitly identified as not having the value of human life q)to be attracted to the grossly literal and earthly, as in believing that dominion over the earth is the end to a religious life r)to have an unnaturally good sense of the pagan elements in Christian worship, especially s)Christmas celebrations, which with its joyful tone and color, is deeply hated t)the doctrine of the soul, which is coming to be understood as a Hellenic interpolation u)the doctrine of an afterlife, as opposed to resurrection of the body, also understood as a Hellenic interpolation v)in middle age, have a dour, hatchet faced appearance w)breed psychological monstrosities, like the twisted busybodies who created the Satanic Ritual Abuse scandal x)often resort to online cut and paste from non scholarly sources instead of honest argumentation and z)are liable to zap the winning arguments of their opponents completely from the board and then go and fiddle with the remaining documentary evidence, like the bicycle-seat sniffing reprobrates that they are.

Maybe it's just me.

Wintermute

- "The initial overblown estimation of 9 million was made in the 18th century, by scholars using historiographic means available to them at the time. It was not made or used in a demagogic fashion."


Regardless of the truthfulness of this claim, all kinds of anti-Christian weirdos still uncritically spout these multi-million figures...

... including our very own NN the Clueless.

Petr

God in Heaven, Jesus Christ, and Mary, Mother of God - is there no limit to the limitations on the intellect of a Christian apologist?!

How very ironic (and moronic) that yours truly - the very one to have just powerfully demonstrated the taking of a clue for analytic purposes - is tasked with failing to do so.

And our Petr characteristically cannot (or chooses not to) remember NN's suggested "figure," and so he multiply and repeatedly mischaracterizes the discussion.

Thus, little seems to be left to us but to solemnly implore the gods for relief from the obstacle(s) to Brother Petr's maturation. May he be granted a profound healing and a restoration (?) to rationality.

It is hardly specific to Calvinists; anyone who has met or spent any time with Christians who take the Old Testament seriously as a spiritual document...

As The Prophet wrote:

And this is the meaning of the Supper of the Passover, the spilling of the blood of the Lamb being a ritual of the Dark Brothers, for they have sealed up the Pylon with blood, lest the Angel of Death should enter therein. Thus do they shut themselves off from the company of the saints... for the blood that they have sprinkled on their Pylon, that is a bar against the Angel Death, is the key by which he entereth in.