Abstract

We have never heard the Devil’s side of the case because God writes all the books.

Samuel Butler

© Dr M D Magee and Saviour Shirlie
Contents Updated: Thursday, 12 December 2002, Friday, 29 June 2007

The Treatment of Jews

Before the witches, the Jews were Christianity’s agents of Satan. The equal civil rights, which Caracalla had conferred on all free people of the empire, Constantine ended for Jews. Christianity had barely been accepted by Constantine before the state became the secular arm of the church and took action against Jews, heretics and pagans. As early as 315 AD, Constantine made conversion from Christianity to Judaism a legal offence, and made death the punishment for Jews who circumcised their Christian slaves. Christians started burning down synagogues. An early case was at Callicnicul on the Euphrates in 338 AD. Nor did the leaders of the Church at the time seek to stop it. S Jerome (340-420) could not find any disgusting phrase bad enough to describe a synagogue. Even S John Chrysostom (350-407) allowed himself to be carried away at Antioch, where he preached eight sermons in 387 AD inflaming the people against Jews.

The punitive laws were re-enacted and made more severe by Constantius, who made death the punishment for marriage between Jews and Christians. Theodosius I and Honorius put a check upon the militant zeal of the Church by prohibiting the destruction of synagogues and maintaining the old privilege that a Jew was not to be summoned before a court of justice on a sabbath. But Honorius banned them from civil and military service, leaving for their employment only the law and the decurionate—municipal posts which were privilegium odiosum because they entailed such a heavy financial burden—and they were no longer free to try cases by their own law. Cases between Jews and Christians were to be tried by Christian judges only. Theodosius II prohibited them from building new synagogues, and again enforced their ineligibility for state employment. Justinian was most hostile of all, but he was also severe against Pagans and Samaritans. He harassed the Jews by obliging them to observe Easter on the same day as the Christians.

Jews were not so harrassed in the barbarian Germanic states which arose on the ruins of the western Roman empire, except where the Catholic Church dominated as among the Spanish Visigoths, where they were cruelly oppressed. The Arian Christian Ostrogoths did not harm them, and nor did the Franks. Indeed, the Carolingians ignored the complaints of the bishops and helped Frankish Jews, allowing them to own land, but they showed no eagerness for it, leaving agriculture to the Germans. They preferred to devote themselves to trade. Commerce had anciently been followed exclusively by the Canaanite cities, and the word “Canaanite” became synonymous with “trader”. Jews were, of course, Canaanites and it passed to them, but Jews were identified with Syria, and “Syrian” replaced the older “Canaanite” in meaning trader. The market was in their hands. According to Agobardus Lugdunensis (Die Insolentia Judaeorum, De Judaicis superstitionibus), no fanatic but as learned and enlightened an ecclesiastic of the Middle Ages as you will find, they pursued the same lucrative business they had pursued in ancient times—buying and selling slaves. Christians were the end customer.

Envy and the ignorance of Christendom did not help. The Jewish culture including its food taboos, cleanliness laws and circumcision, set them apart, and ignorant Christians could not understand it. They claimed Jews smelt of sulphur. They thought they had horns and a tail. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 forbade Jews from owning land, and obliged them to dress in a prescribed manner. The Church made them wear special badges just as the Nazis did. Pope Gregory IX condemned the Jewish Talmud as satanic in 1236. They were accused all the time by Christians of satanic rituals, and sacrificing Christian children to Satan. Chaucer has such a story in Canterbury Tales—The Prioress’s Tale.

When miracle plays stimulated Christian imaginations, mobs would rage into the Jewish sector of the cities. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (1999) describes paintings by Paolo Uccello on the altarpiece of the Communion of the Apostles in the Ducal Palace in Urbino showing a Jewish family terrified by a Christian mob battering down the door to their house. The mob knew the host had been desecrated within by the flow of holy blood through the walls. One of the two Jewish children weeps in fear, while a younger one clings to its mother’s skirts. Another panel shows the family, bound together, burning at the stake.

The Jewish inhabitants had to be protected by the authorities, when they chose to, and they sometimes did because the Jews had an important financial function that the wealthy needed to be able to operate. Jews in Christendom were not allowed to practice any profession except usury. They had been debarred from almost every way of earning an income including land ownership. They could not even trade, the natural employment of Jews for centuries, because they ran such a risk of being murdered. All that remained was to be a money lender, and this is why they were tolerated to a minimal degree. Usury was, at least in theory, forbidden to Christians as sinful. In fact, wealthy Christians and churchmen were bankers, and the large Catholic cathedrals like Siena were banks lending money at interest under various guises. The Jewish money lender did the same for peasants and artisans because they could do nothing else.

Christians were led to believe that Jews were obsessed with stealing communion wafers to mutilate to the point of risking a horrific death, and the Urbino paintings show the first case of it in Paris in 1290. The wings of an altarpiece in the Chapel of the Holy Blood (consecrated 1396), in Pulkau, Lower Austria, decorated with the paintings of Nicholas Breu (c 1520), have been withdrawn from display because they show Jews desecrating the host in 1338. For this sacrilege, Jews were robbed of their valuables, drowned, burnt, beheaded and disembowelled. Whole families were destroyed, including children in their cribs. Jews even confessed to the crime, and supplied a wealth of detail about what they did, just as the witches who were tortured by the Christians did too.

Jews had no obsession with the host. The ones who were obsessed were the medieval Catholic Christians. Gavin Langmuir (History, Religion and Antisemitism, 1990, and Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 1990) explains that the host desecration myth grew from the imposition of the doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the body and blood of Christ—normally thought of as the infant Jesus—is present in the sacramental bread and wine. This absurd belief offered severe problems for Christian theologians, such as the implications of digesting and excreting the body of Christ, or spewing it up. The reflexion of this disturbing idea was that Jews allegedly threw desecrated wafers in to cess pits and spoil heaps. Guilty Catholics sought to expel Jews to the edge of Christian society, if not to be rid of them entirely. The Protestant Reformation put paid to the myth.

Rubin says the perpetrator was always a male Jew, his accomplice normally a female Christian and the Jew’s alarmed wife often converted at the end. Innocent children, both Christian and Jewish, reported what went on so that it could not be considered biased, though Jewish children were often punished along with their persecuted families. Rulers and priests were mocked because they did not want “their” Jews, an important source of income, destroyed.

Jews were considered as black magicians, and, exactly parallel with the witches, were believed to worship Satan, in the shape of a toad or a cat. They were associated with and described by Christians as pigs, worms, snakes, frogs, goats and scorpions. In religious dramas and miracle plays, Jews were made to wear horns and goatee beards, and, in their everyday lives, the authorities tried to make them wear horns on their hats. Pictures of Satan were given features considered as Jewish, and he was called the “Father of the Jews”, apparently accepting that the Hebrew God was Himself Satan, the Gnostic idea.

If anything, the Catholic treatment of Jews, heretics and witches suggests that the heretics were tolerant of Jews, as they seem to have been in the Cathar counties of Southern France. Since primitive Christianity and Judaism must have originally had a great deal in common, the grass roots of both religions might have remained closer than establishment Christianity wanted. Division and scapegoating is a strategy of conquest as Jesus himself knew (Mk 3:24-35). It suited the ruling Church, but the primitive Church perhaps resisted it.

Witchcraft

The massacre of women in the witch hunts was tragic even if witches were ugly and malicious old women.

An old woman with a wrinkled face, a furrowed brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back, a spindle in her hand, and a dog by her side—a wretched, infirm and impotent creature, pelted and persecuted by all the neighbours because the farmer’s cart had stuck in the gateway, or some idle boy had pretended to spit needles and pins for the sake of a holiday from school or work.

Joseph McCabe

One of the last examples of witch madness, in 1692, was that at Salem in Massachusetts where 19 people were judicially murdered through silly girls playing the childish trick of pretending to be possessed. Any old dame, widow or spinster, who was wise enough to wish to avoid the cackle of her empty headed neighbours was apt to be suspected of witchcraft. The child who fell ill—infected by the open drain or cesspool by the door—had passed her in the street, and so had clearly been bewitched—the mother who had a miscarriage, the farmer whose pigs sickened.

The witch! Drown her! Better still, let the priest see to it, and then the horrors of trial and torture will be added to the injustice. Life increasingly became hell to such old dames in the thousand years after the establishment of the religion which is said to have uplifted woman. Murdering old women happened for many centuries all over Christendom.

Witchcraft was heresy. It was a religious crime. The crime and punishment were entirely Christian. Witches were believed to be empowered by the Devil and the Jewish scriptures said that witches should not be permitted to live. The Holy Ghost fell upon the clerics and told them to torture, burn or drown hundreds of thousands—no one knows how many—mainly women because they were witches.

The vivid faith of those heroic days made people more sensitive to the Devil’s work in the world.

This is the Christian excuse. “Sorry for the old ladies, of course, but… You can understand it, can’t you?” So, the murdered woman was a soured, demented, misanthropic old dame with one foot in the grave. Does that justify the crime? How many dead old women is a cathedral worth? Christians seem to think the beauty of a cathedral is worth the death of a few myriad crusty and squint-eyed old women.

But the witches were not mainly old women. Women of all ages, from the infant on, were arraigned. At Salem, a four year old child, Dorcas Good, was imprisoned accused of witchcraft, and was chained to a wall for eight months. A little girl of eight years was solemnly tried for witchcraft by the Inquisition because playmates said that she could make mice. The poor child had made “mice” by folding and knotting her handkerchief into some fancied resemblance to mice.

The dangerous women were younger women. Feeble old dames were at first a minority. Thousands of maids in their teens, like Joan of Arc were drowned or burned at the stake as witches. In the many reports of witch trials, maidens are more common than old women, and young women in their twenties and thirties, defiant of the priests, were most likely to be dragged before the Roman Inquisition or the Protestant bishop. Women of every rank appear in the lists of victims. So too do men—more often than people think—men of every rank and degree of education or illiteracy, including priests, nobles and officials and leaders of armies as well as peasants and artisans.

A letter written in Wurzburg in 1629 goes:

There are still four hundred in the city, high and low, of every rank and sex—nay, even clerics—so strongly accused that they may be arrested any hour. Some out of all offices and faculties must be executed, clerics, counsellors, doctors, city officials and court assessors. There are law students to be arrested. The prince bishop has over forty students here who are to be pastors, thirteen or fourteen of these are said to be witches. A few days ago a dean was arrested, two others who were summoned have fled. The notary of our church consistory, a learned man, was yesterday arrested and put to torture. In a word, a third part of the city is involved. A week ago a maiden of nineteen was put to death, of whom it is everywhere said that she was the fairest in the whole city and was held by everybody a girl of singular modesty and purity. She will be followed by seven or eight others of the fairest. There are three hundred children of three or four years of age who are said to have had intercourse with the Devil. I have seen put to death children of ten, promising pupils of ten, twelve, fourteen, fifteen.

The Christian Doctrine of the Witch

Before the Church got to work, people had always believed in magic spells and the evil eye, but they were the work of individual sorcerers, not a world wide Satanic plot. Indeed, the earlier Church smiled on the delusion of witchcraft and sought to dispel it.

The whole of the history of the witch hunts has been confused deliberately by using the word witch wrongly. Remember always that the records were made by the prejudiced pens of monkish chroniclers. A witch properly is a shaman, originally a priest of the primitive religion of the dead, but later an individual sorcerer of either sex, eventually conceived, in the age of organized religion, as malevolent. The spirits of the dead were thought of as malignant and malevolent, and the shamans were thought to act with them by practising “black magic”, to make and break curses, and cause storms, blight, illness or death. In common law in Europe, shamans were considered witches.

The Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians believed that myriads of malevolent spirits hovered about the earth and caused all the evils of humanity, and that a class of these malignant beings moved about at night, inspiring bad dreams, and sucking the blood of sleepers. The belief in these spirits, later called demons, passed through the Jews into Christianity, and beliefs in night prowlers and blood suckers or entrail suckers, vampires, harpies and banshees spread in the west. The Greek and Latin word strix, which properly means the screech owl, was applied to these dreaded night birds.

The Romans thought Hades was the home of shades, the shadows of dead people, vacant and insubstantial, but they believed in magic and its evil powers. The connexion of magic and religion is often said not to exist or not to be be clear, usually by religious believers. M Mauss, in A General Theory of Magic says magic is not just a single spell or incantation. The characteristic of magic is repetition:

Magic and magical rites are traditional events. Actions which are not repeated cannot be called magical.

If Mauss is right, religion is in the category of communal magic. Christians say the difference between Christ dying and being resurrected, and the older corn gods who died and were restored to life every year is that Christ died once and for all as a redeeming sacrifice. But his death and resurrection are celebrated every year just as if they happened every Easter. Both are equally magical repetitive ceremonies with the same function—to conjure life!

The holy communion ritual or mass is no less magical, through having to be repeated. God must know that someone has joined with him through partaking of the body of Christ, and surely must think that once it has been done, it looks like an anxious persistence or obsession to want to keep doing it. But clergymen do not live comfortably through teaching that God has a good memory. It is more profitable to claim He has a bad one, and the repetition of the mass is just what the heavenly doctor ordered for the wellbeing of his earthly leeches. Most Christians treat the process as a magical one that needs repeating or renewing to be effective, and that suits the men in frocks. Most pious Christians must have so much of the body of Christ in them after a lifetime of receiving the holy communion it is hardly surprising they come to think they are Christ. Yet they try to say religion is more advanced than magic!

In fact, classical Paganism was as opposed to witches as Catholic Christianity, and so was the Paganism of pre-modern Europe, as Ronald Hutton points out. The magician was exposed to a sentence of death in Roman law and was often executed, but the law was secular not religious—the magician was dangerous to the community.

Woman had been the foundation of the gentile Church, but now it was keen to sever any suggestions of dependence on female support to suit the increasing favouritism of Constantine. The changes at the top conditioned by its new power meant the bishops wanted to oppose the grass roots primitive practice of Christianity at the roots. The Church was adopting a new theology to match its new power as the official religion of the secular authority, the Emperor. It was to bind everyone to the Church from birth. It was original sin. S Augustine, a genius of Catholic politics and theology, formulated it, but not all contemporary Christians agreed. Julian of Eclanum wrote twelve volumes against Augustine, but they have been “lost”! Yet Julian had done what Christ in the gospels had advocated, he had give all of his considerable wealth to the poor. The new power granted to the Church did not gel with the teaching of Christ, so a theology of a different character was needed. Sex as sin was the weapon to keep Christians compliant, and the new theology made the sexual error of Adam and Eve the source of the new sin that would be with everyone from birth.

The synods of Elvira (306), Ancyra (314) and Laodicea (375), and the sermons of S Chrysostom and the other great preachers, show that Christians accepted the magical practices of the Hellenistic Pagan world. The Fathers of the Church, particularly S Augustine, denounced magic as “Pagan” and as a collusion with the devils. If there were a lot of devils before Christianity, there were a lot more after it. The Latin and Catholic bible translates Psalms 96:5: “For all the gods of the nations are idols”, as: “The gods of the heathen are devils”. This blatant mistranslation, a Christian practice common until this day, was responsible for numberless tragedies.

At Ancyra, the Church was curiously interested in diabolism, and those who worshipped Diana. S Augustine put the weight of his authority against witches, and this is what the Church remembered when it wanted to. Denouncing them as Pagan seemed not to work, so S Augustine devised a more deadly theory—the magician or witch was in league with the Devil. Christians used the label “witch” for those they accused of malevolence—supposedly a malevolent user of sex and magic. The bible was clear about such people. Leviticus 20:27 and Exodus 22:18 defined a witch as one who “hath a familiar spirit” and condemned him or her to death. At Milan, in 313, Christian bishops declared all Pagan gods as devils, and prohibited worship of them. The many Pagan gods that people had revered for centuries suddenly became a host of additional devils, and ones that people were familiar with!

Max Marwick explains that anthropologists distinguish witchcraft from sorcery because the Zande, studied by E Evans-Pritchard made a distinction between them. The distinction is that a witch has a power of the will by which they achieve their purpose, whereas the sorcerer uses rituals, spells and invocations to control some external supernatural power by which the required deeds are done. The psychic power, that the witch has, has to be transferred into them by hereditary or by some act, whereas anyone could be a sorcerer if they knew the rituals or spells. As Keith Thomas points out, in Religion and the Decline of Magic, witchcraft on this definition is an impossible crime, but sorcery could involve a poison. The distinction might be useful among the Zande but it is a distinction that was not generally made in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, though Francis Bacon seemed to have made it.

In the Leges Henrici of 1114, among the murders punishable by death, murder by witchcraft is mentioned, so witchcraft was recognized as potentially dangerous in the early twelfth century, but seems not to have been criminal in itself. Nor does the presence or absence of ritual or magical techniques seem to have entered the witch trials, or generally bothered the witch hunters. The main interest of those concerned with witches was that they were malign, whatever powers they had. Indeed, the widespread Christian concept of the witch was that they had their rituals, the central one being categorized as a mockery of the Christian mass, and that they had their power, not out of hereditary or having it passed to them somehow, but through a compact with the Devil.

The earliest recorded pact with the Devil is described by S Basil (330-379). A young slave sold his soul to the Devil to procure the illicit love of his master’s daughter. The saint saved him, as saints did in those days! S Augustine also speaks of Satanic pacts, but no other specific cases are mentioned until William of Malmesbury alleged that Gerbert sold his soul in a pact with Satan to obtain the papacy itself in 999. Since everything in the world is within the gift of the Devil, according to Matthew, we should not be surprised that the Catholic Church is too—or the Protestant Churches. About 1300, the bishop of Coventry was accused of making a pact, and John Tannore, a pretender to the throne of Edward I (1239-1307), confessed to a satanic pact to try to attain it. Since he failed, it should have been a warning not to shake hands with the Devil, one would have thought, but only Satanists are more foolish than Christians. If poor Catholics had to sell their souls to the Devil, they must have been desperate. Either a thousand years of Catholic propaganda had had no effect on their superstitions, or the accusation is baloney and the rewards and comforts of whatever cult they were indulging in were greater than those offered by Catholic Christianity.

The Roman persecution of magicians was based entirely on the belief that they had abnormal powers, and the progress of enlightenment might have undermined this belief. But if magic meant collusion with the Devil, belief in it was sure to be magnified under a religion which taught that the world swarmed with devils. As it was, the doctrine of the Devil elaborated by the great theologians of the Middle Ages caused the massacres of witches in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The reason was that the word “witch” was applied to heretics—the dualist heretics called Cathars. Having scattered them with the Albigensian crusade and the Inquisition, and driven them into hiding, the Christian cardinals had to come up with a new way of rooting them out. They defined them as witches and Satanists, and set the population into a frenzy against them. The Cathars, who held that the influence of the Devil had perverted the teachings of Christianity, were falsely accused of worshipping the Devil as witches. Marwick correctly notes that the Church identified witchcraft with heresy.

Witches were identified with heretics and this brought a new weapon to the armoury of the Church. Moral indignation against witches could now be pressed into service against those who failed to conform with official Christianity.

Max Marwick

And a variety of authorities note that only Christians could be witches, placing it within the definition of a Christian heresy:

In every respect, they represent a collective invasion of Christianity—and an invasion os a kind that could only be achieved by former Christians.

Norman Cohn

Jews and Gypsies were almost never accused of witchcraft… The standard explanation of this phenomenon is that witchcraft was a heresy, and therefore one had to be a Christian to become a witch.

H C E Midelfort, Witchhunting in Southwestern Germany

Only a Christian could be a witch.

R H Robbins Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology

Ademar and Wazo of Liege said that once won to heresy, people were lost forever to the church. Brother Berthold of Ratisbon (1220-1272), a Franciscan, with Etienne de Bourbon, a Dominican, confirmed that it was all too easy for the Catholic to become a heretic, yet a heretic could never be converted back to Catholicism. Berthold’s argument was based on the German for heretic, “ketzer”, and for cat, “katze”, the Devil’s animal. Earlier, in Against the Heretics of My Times, Alain de Lille (1202) proposed that the word Cathar came from vulgar Latin cattus, a cat. It was because the Devil supposedly appeared to the Cathars as a cat. The cat worked great harm in a short time. It licked a toad then drank where people drank, sneezing into the water, poisoning it and making it deadly. So:

Ye folk, drive her away, for the breathe that comes from her throat is most unsound and perilous… All that applied to the katze applied to the Ketzer, “since in all his ways, he is like no beast as much as a cat”.

Brother Berthold

He bears himself softly, as a cat, and goes to folk demurely (geistlich, ghost-like) to sweet talk them as if he were an angel not a devil. Paul Halsall of Fordham College cites these:

The Cathar is called a ketzer because his manner resembles that of no animal so much as that of the cats with their duplicity.

The name Cathar derives from cat, because they kiss the ass of the cat, in whose shape they say Lucifer appears to them.

This latter plainly identifies Cathars and witches. “Ketzermeister”, master of heretics, was punned into “Katzenmeister”, master of cats. Similarly, “Katzenglaube”, cats’ faith was used for superstition or heresy. Cathars were even accused of making cats. Berthold concludes:

Rather than dwell knowingly one brief fortnight in the same house with a heretic, I would dwell a whole year with five hundred devils.

Brother Berthold was showing the insane fear of heresy that caused the Cathar Crusade, the Inquisition, and identifiably the fear of witches and their pet cats! Berthold often preached against women as witches!

Many of the village folk would come to heaven were it not for their witchcrafts… The woman has spells for getting a husband, spells for her marriage… spells before the child was born, before the Christening, after the Christening… Ye men, it is much marvel that ye lose not your wits for the monstrous witchcrafts that women practise on you!

That was the state of mind that drove Catholic Christians to barbarities that modern fundamentalists seek to emulate. And the same myths were used to back it up whoever the danger was thought to be. Jews worshipped cats before heretics, and heretics sound no different from witches. A contemporary Englishman, Walter Map (d 1209), famous for his part in the transmission of the Arthurian legend, says heretical apostates related that, at the first watch of night, they met in their synagogues, closed the doors and windows, and waited in silence, until an extraordinarly large black cat descended among them by a rope. Immediately, they put out the lights, and muttering through their teeth instead of singing their hymns, felt their way to this object of their worship, and kissed it, according to their feelings of humility or pride, some on the feet, some under the tail, and others on the genitals, after which each seized upon the nearest person of a different sex, and had carnal intercourse as long as he was able. The most perfect degree of charity was to do or suffer in this manner whatever a brother or sister might desire and ask. The relationship of this description with the later witchcraft is evident, and the falseness of the story is within itself, for how would the apostate observers see what was going on in the pitch darkness. How could they know what parts of the cat others kissed? It was an oft repeated calumny.

Belief in the heretics’ sabbath first appears early in the eleventh century, then the accusation of having sex with demons became part of the accusations against them. Witches were not persecuted much before the thirteenth century. The crime of witchcraft was introduced in the Europe of the late Middle Ages just when the heretics seemed no more. In 1250, certain bishops gave Etienne de Bourbon a description of the sabbat, and twenty five years later the Inquisition described the first case of this kind. From the fourteenth century, the idea was connected with witchcraft. Already in 1258, the inquisitors acknowledged magic as heresy. From 1320, the idea became commonplace.

Before 1400, witches were no great bother. Between 1400 and 1800, witches were dangerous, and were often judicially murdered, but capital punishment of witches was not common until the fifteenth century. The first major witch hunt occurred in Switzerland in 1427, and the first important book on the subject, the Malleus Maleficarum, appeared in Germany in 1486. The persecution of witches reached its height between 1580 and 1660, when witch trials became common throughout western Europe, notably in France, Germany and Switzerland. After 1800, witches were no bother again. Hugh Trevor-Roper (The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries) describes the witch craze that exploded from 1500-1700 as:

The organized, systematic demonology which the medieval Church constructed…

Self Delusion to Mass Delusion

Christian moralists, during the early Middle Ages, thought witchcraft was an illusion, but some prosecutions for witchcraft took place. Witches fooled themselves, or only imagined they had any power, at the instigation of the Devil. Europe openly disdained the idea of witchcraft. The Church authorities said witchcraft could do no harm because it was not real. Jenny Gibbons, on the web, reminds us that the fifth century synod of S Patrick declared:

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.

In Saxony, burning a witch was itself a capital murder. Under Charlemagne a synod held at Paderborn in 785 enacted:

Whosoever, deceived by the Devil, believes, as the Pagans did, that any person is a witch and can devour men, and therefore burns that person, and gives her flesh to others to eat, shall be put to death.

The Salic Law in south Germany sentenced the blood sucking nocturnal creatures (striga) to death. The Lombard Law treated the idea as a superstition. The Church forbade casting hexes but the penalties were slight if no one died. In the Middle Ages, harmful magic was punished, and trials happened mainly when a powerful figure complained of witchcraft.

The Church had as yet no clear antagonism to striga. It was chiefly bothered about erotic magic. In 860, the archbishop of Rheims, Hincmar, held a solemn inquiry into the king’s concubine who was supposed to have used erotic magic on the queen. He found devilry proved. But few witches were executed until the eleventh century, when isolated executions appear more frequently in the chronicles. Torture was permitted by the Roman civil law, but no fanatical denunciation and persecution of witches arose at these early dates. Pope Nicholas I (866), banned the use of torture.

A life of pope Damasus, of the fourth century, claims that as early as 367 a Roman synod acknowledged that women rode on beasts at night with Herodias. At the end of the tenth century, Abbot Regino of Prüm collected together many Church laws and canons. One of these, De Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis, is concerned with witches. Its uncertain date is assigned to 906. It says:

Certain wicked women, who have turned aside to Satan, seduced by the illusions and phantasms of the demons, believe and profess that during the night they ride on certain beasts with Diana [or Herodias] the goddess of the Pagans and a countless horde of women, and pass over vast tracts of the earth during the night, obeying her commands as their mistress, and on certain nights are summoned to her service. Would that these had perished in their perfidy and had not dragged many with them to destruction! For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe that these things are true and so depart from the faith and fall into the error of the Pagans, believing that there is some divinity apart from the one God.

It is the duty of priests earnestly to instruct the people that these things are absolutely untrue and that such imaginings are planted in the minds of misbelieving folk, not by a Divine spirit, but by the spirit of evil.

Abbot Regino was certain that priests could be ordered to instruct people correctly, giving the lie to clerical excuses that these matters were out of their hands! Was this just simple superstition—the imaginings of silly women? Or were the ecclesiasticals aware that they were up against a rival religion to Catholicism. Their tactic was that these practitioners were deluded and should stop it, but the priests admitted that the misbelieving folk considered themselves led by a “divine” spirit. Regino’s canon suggests there was something organized going on in Europe. Numbers of women evidently met by night to honor Diana. Or was it Dianus—Janus? Did this only happen at the new year? Dualistic religious systems highlight the new year because it a microcosm of the eschaton when the old and wicked is destroyed and the new is perfection and good. In any event, sure enough, the Canon Episcopi, a Church law appeared in 906, decreeing that such beliefs were heretical.

A century after Abbot Regino, Bishop Burchard of Worms in his Corrector (c 1020) thought women could make magical potions, which may produce impotence or abortion. This was folk medicine, but he rejected many of the marvellous powers witches were supposed to have. Some thought they were vampires:

Some women claim that they can, even while they lie in bed with their husbands, fly out in the air and suck the heart and entrails out of other men who are abed.

The concern was witches causing harm (maleficia) through spells—raising storms, killing people or livestock, and causing bad luck. The Church argued that women did not ride through the air by night, change people’s disposition from love to hate, control thunder, rain, and sunshine, change a man into an animal, or send incubi and succubi to have intercourse with human beings. These were superstitious ideas all right, but, to try to do them, believing they can be done, was a sin requiring a heavy penance. Essentially the popular idea was superstition, and that is what the Church had traditionally opposed in a mainly gentle fashion. But even Pope Sylvester II, Gerbert, was accused of magic.

S Boniface declared a belief in witches as unchristian. S Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, told people witches could not change the weather, and others about the same time said they could not take the form of animals and fly about at night. Gregory VII, in 1080, wrote to King Harold of Denmark forbidding witches to be put to death upon presumption of their having caused storms or failure of crops or pestilence.

The eastern Church was also relaxed even after the Great Schism (1054). Though the Orthodox Church was strongly critical of sorcerers, and even palmists, fortune tellers and astrologers, witch hunts such as those experienced in Western Europe were unknown. Accusations, show trials and secular penalties, were not staged as a warning, but rather the sorcerer was invited to confess and repent. Exorcism, perhaps a form of torture, was a last resort. The Orthodox Church periodically attacked the Paulicians and the Bogomils, but did not elaborate complicated schemes of totalitarian terror like the Inquisition. The situation was similar in east and west but only the west built up a fantastic demonology and finished up with a witch hunt.

King Koloman of Hungary, in the eleventh century, refused to have any mention of witches in his laws because they did not exist. Even in the twelfth century, John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres, refused to believe in the strix. The witches’ sabbat was only their nightmare. Things were changing however. Caesar of Heisterbach (c 1225) and William of Paris (c 1230) believed in female vampires that travel by night and eat children—the lamiae and striga—even though they were not human women. The Church was doing a U-turn.

For the church, witchcraft had long consisted in the recognition of demons, and now the intellectuals of the medieval Church, the schoolmen, soon began to find them everywhere. The Scholastic movement, the rise of the great theologians of the Middle Ages, was one of the effects of the civilizing influence of the Moors, but the scholarship of the scholars was arid and sterile speculation, pointless and repellent to the modern mind. Instead of discovering the fraudulent bases of the power of the Church, they encouraged it to exploit and torture humanity more than ever.

S Thomas Aquinas, the top scholar of the medieval church, died in 1274 among the monks of Fossanova. His fate is its own commentary on Christianity—the monks decapitated him and boiled him enough to preserve him, knowing he would be a fine moneyspinner as a holy relic. He was an obese Dominican monk so drugged by his religion, like modern day Southern Baptists, that be could have proved the popes passed through the eye of a needle to get into the Vatican. Using the new scholarship, the case for the witches was confirmed by the highest authority in Christendom. Aquinas turned his scholastic powers to deal with devils. Concerning the oculus fascinans, the evil eye, he wrote:

When the soul is moved to wickedness, as occurs mostly in little old women… the countenance becomes venomous and hurtful, especially to children who have a tender and most impressionable body.

Summa Theologica

Aquinas confirmed the world was full of devils and they were just as busy as pope Gregory the Great had imagined. Succubi or female demons and incubi or male demons tormented the sexes with lascivious experiences by night—a medieval equivalent of UFO abductions. It is impossible to believe anything other than that the modern obsession with alien abduction, nocturnal examination and intercourse has the same psychological origins as the obsessions of Aquinas and the Church in these centuries. The more saintly and chaste the person, the worse they were attacked by these devils.

So, devils definitely allowed witches to fly through the air by night, copulated with human beings, and had children:

When children are born of the intercourse of devils with human beings, they do not come from the seed of the devil or of the human body he has assumed, but of seed which he has extracted from another human being. The same devil, who as a woman, has intercourse with a man can also, in the form of a man, have intercourse with a woman.

In the year after the death of Aquinas, 1275, according to H C Lea, Hugues de Baniols, another Dominican and inquisitor was trying heretics at Toulouse, the center of Catharism. Amongst them was a noble lady, Angela de la Barthe, about sixty years old, refined and wealthy, and accused of witchcraft. She is the link between witchcraft and heresy. The woman confessed under torture that she spent the nights in intercourse with the Devil, and that she had given birth to a child with a wolf’s head and a serpent’s tail, which had to be fed on the flesh of babies. She used, she said, to go out nightly and steal babies for the purpose.

This child monster, which often occurs in confessions, might have been the figment of the inquisitors’ or the woman’s recollection of a miscarriage or stillbirth—or even both! Pregnant women must have often miscarried under torture, and the ignorant and unworldly priests might easily have regarded the poor foetus as a monstrosity. After judicial sentence the Cathar lady was condemned for having intercourse with the Devil, and was burned to death. Carnal intercourse with demons was taken for granted by schoolmen, like S Thomas Aquinas and S Bonaventure. From now on convicted witches were increasingly executed.

For two centuries, the clergy preached against witches and the lawyers sentenced them… The monks of the middle ages sowed. The lawyers of the sixteenth century reaped. And what a harvest of witches they gathered in!

Hugh Trevor-Roper

The Church—building on the foundations of the scholastics and the evidence that the Cathars had gone into hiding, but were still active—invented a satanic conspiracy to destroy Christendom. In the Great Witch Hunt, Catholics and Protestants alike in Western Europe were gripped by fear of this conspiracy. It was seen as having power so great that no witch could be set free from it in this life, and the only possible remedy was death. Such a belief was fundamentally dualistic—for all practical purposes the Devil’s power was considered to be as great as, if not greater than, that of God. Much of Europe was demonised.

Thomas Aquinas was and still is regarded as a genius of the Church, but the witch hunts and the charred remains of myriads in the centuries afterwards are his true memorial, and of the Dominican order and the inspired wisdom of the Christian Catholic Church. Christians and non-Christians alike say the guesses at the numbers killed by the churches in the various killing fields are exaggerated. From the massacre of the Albigenses to the last person to die in the Inquisition, the numbers dying from this delusion are undoubtedly millions. If it comforts any Christian to think it was only one million and that is more acceptable than two million, then let them be comforted. They prove they have the mentality of an inquisitor.

For centuries the Church deals only with individual sorcerers, male or female. But a new element was entering European life, and it throws a fascinating light upon witchcraft. Thomas Aquinas with his absurd demonology and the Inquisition with its terrible scent for heresy are said to have created witchcraft. Witchcraft was their new name for Catharism. They just created the hysteria about it.

Witchcraft in the Inquisition

Sorry, your browser doesn’t support Java. Applet by Fabio Ciucci

It is false, as some apologists say, that witchcraft was excluded from the Inquisition. The Inquisition focused at first on heretics, but, after the middle of the thirteenth century, that changed and the new papal Inquisition began to concern itself with charges of witchcraft. The range of crimes inquisitors prosecuted widened to include witchcraft and sorcery in 1258, but because the Canon Episcopi had declared against the existence of striga, pope Alexander IV insisted that no charge of witchcraft was sufficient of itself. Alexander IV ruled (1258) that the inquisitors should limit their intervention to those cases in which there was some clear presumption of heretical belief:

The inquisitors, deputed to investigate heresy, must not intrude into investigations of divination or sorcery without knowledge of manifest heresy involved.

In 1326, the Church reversed its earlier unclear position and allowed the Inquisition to investigate witchcraft. It was important because it developed the theory of the satanic origin of witchcraft. Until the twelfth century, only a few isolated witches were executed for practising black magic. In the thirteenth century, more were, but trials of witches were still few, until another pope gave an impulse to the campaign. Pope John XXII (1316-1334), who had been a bishop in Languedoc, and was terrified of witches, authorized the Inquisition to proceed fully against them. He also declared as heretical the poverty of Christ, thus making the Holy Word itself heretical.

The papal court was then at Avignon. The hundred years of comparative virtue since Hildebrand, which had followed a hundred and fifty years of vice, were now over and the Papacy was as corrupt as ever. Petrarch called the “sacred palace” at Avignon “the sink of all vices”, and there were certainly not many vices that were not practiced by the cardinals. One was black magic and when, in 1320, some cardinals sought to bring about the death of the pope using poison and alleged witchcraft, John began to take a peculiar interest in the black art. John XXII and Benedict XII (1334-1342), in their papal constitutions, formalized and stimulated the prosecution of witches by the inquisitors, especially in the south of France.

From then on witchcraft was a secret heresy, witches and heretics were accused of the same crimes, and punishments for witches were those of heretics. The Church published many tracts stating the similarities of witches and heretics. The Catholic, Thomas Stapleton, said:

Witchcraft grows with heresy, heresy with witchcraft.

In 1450, Jean Vincti, an inquisitor of Carcasonne wrote a witch hunter’s manual. He admitted in it that witchcraft was a heresy, and had nothing to do with local sorcerors. It was an important statement because it meant the Canon Episcopi could be ignored as referring to a different phenomenon.

Witchcraft must have been considered as potentially heretical to be in the remit of the inquisitors, and it was inferred from any suspected magical practice. A “manifest heresy” was praying at the altars of idols, offering sacrifices, consulting demons, eliciting responses from them, and associating publicly with heretics. Bearing in mind that, what was considered not to be Christian or to be heretical was automatically idolatrous, and all gods other than the ridings of the Trinity were idols, and there is nothing in this that obliges the target to be Pagans. The references clearly allude to the practice of a religion, but a Christian heresy is more likely than a Pagan survival. As a heresy of Christianity, the Church considered whatever the witches were doing to have been Christian.

The Inquisition imposed heavy fines and confiscated the goods of its victims. The clergy, the inquisitors, and the informers who were never named in court, shared these funds. Such procedure would disgrace fascists. Thousands of victims of the Inquisition had only one heresy—a good bank account.

In 1468, the pope declared witchcraft a crimen exceptum thus removing all restrictions on the application of torture. Apologists argue that popes such as Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Leo X and Clement VII, all of whom stimulated the persecution of witches, were not bigoted and nor was the Church. How on earth can the Church and its principal officers not be bigoted? Bigotry is blind attachment to a belief. It is precisely what Christianity is! This blind attachment led these men, however fine intelligences they might have had, to pursue relentlessly people innocent of any crime other than to disagree with their own bigoted ideas. Indeed, for men to suspend their critical faculties and believe the incredible nonsense produced from the witch trials, under the tortures that they themselves prescribed, is to prove they had the imagination and intelligence of a scorpion, not of a leader of any religion putatively of love. No one with any degree of imagination, could approve of burning any vertebrate alive, let alone a human being.

It was held that God would give an innocent person strength to withstand any amount of torture.

Norman Cohn

About one in ten victims could withstand the pain sufficiently long to be pardoned on this account, according to E Delcambre in papers published in 1953 and 1954, cited by Cohn. So, ten percent could escape being burnt alive but only by undergoing the most excrutiatingly intense and extended torture. To believe this is to believe that God is Himself a torturer. The God of these Christians therefore could only have been Satan, and the heretics and witches were right.

The popes were responsible for the new epidemic. Engenius IV had, in 1437, urged the inquisitors to look out for witches. They found plenty in France, Italy and Switzerland but in Germany their zeal was checked by comparatively humane rulers and bishops. The spirit that begot the Reformation was growing, but the German inquisitors reported to Rome that Germany was full of witches of both sexes, and that they formed a well organized sect. The wide publication of inquisitors’ manuals, and a succession of papal bulls urgently refuted the old Christian idea, and made witchcraft a dangerous heresy.

The two centuries of the witch craze were instigated by two documents in the 1480s. One was the papal bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, of Innocent VIII issued in 1484, noting with horror the spread of witchcraft in Germany, and instructing the fanatical Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Krämer (Institutoris), Dean of Cologne University, and Jakob Sprenger, the Dominican Inquisitor General of Germany, to stamp it out. Krämer was the inquisitor in Tyrol, then in Bohemia and Moravia where he persecuted Waldenses and witches alike. The Bishop of Strasburg was to give the inquisitors his support. The other was the complementary book, Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches), a vade mecum of witches and demonology they published two years later in 1486.

The Dominican monk, Alain de la Roche, in the mid-fifteenth century, propagated the use of the rosary, founding a brotherhood for the purpose. He was blessed with many gross visions—animals and people with grotesque genitals moved amidst smoke and flame while the Prostitute of Apostasy vomited apostates then devoured them again, or instead kissing and petting them affectionately as children. Demonic imagges like these linked the excessive pietism of the middle ages, and its symbol, the Rosary, with its worst manifestation—witchcraft. De la Roche was the preceptor, the mentor, of Jakob Sprenger, who was the German leader of the Brotherhood of the Rosary. The Rosary should inspire every Catholic with the horror of the burning flesh of innocents!

The inquisitors had solicited the bull to authorize at the highest level their campaign in Germany, and having achieved the authorisation, they published it in their shock-horror book so that no one had any doubts over their duty and the methods they proposed to use. Apologists say it was a routine reiteration of the authority of the Inquisition, doing nothing new. The absurdity of this is plain. No law that is in the statute book needs to be re-issued or restated. It is there to be used. Any restatement of it must have a purpose. This bull intended a broadening of the Inquisition. With its offspring, the Malleus Maleficarum, it spread its message of hatred over the whole of the papacy in more certain terms than ever. It obliged all secular authorities to stop their prevarication and join in the persecution of witches.

The Malleus Maleficarum is clear that torture was not merely for the purpose of extracting a confession. It was part of the punishment:

Witchcraft is high treason against God’s majesty. And so they are to be put to torture to make them confess. Any person, whatever his rank or position, upon such an accusation may be put to torture. And he who is found guilty, even if he confesses his crime, let him be racked, let him suffer all other tortures presecribed by law in order that he may be punished in proportion to his offence.

In Malleus Maleficarum, the inquisitors were recommended to lift witches from the ground, the earth being supposed to have been the source of their power. It suggests the dualist hypothesis of the witch religion again, the mass of the earth being the material world as opposed to the spirituality of the heavens. In short, it supports the idea of the witches being dualist heretics akin to the Cathars.

The Malleus was plainly dualist in posing God and His agents, the Catholic priesthood, against the Devil and his agents, the witches. In this parallel, then, witches were considered the priesthood of a rival religion to Catholicism. Yet Catholic theology maintained the omnipotence of God. Any uncommitted observer would have been baffled by the practical impotence of the universal God to practice what His Son preached, and persuade His acolytes that cruelly murdering His own creatures was the ultimate sin. The Christian marriage ceremony declared that no one just united in marriage by God could be pulled asunder, yet it was not only allowed but required for a load of religious fanatics to go about killing what God had created. Before long, it was not only Catholics who were doing it. There is no apology or excuse. The outside observer has to declare Christianity itself as Satanic.

Practices which in earlier centuries had been vaguely ascribed to heretical groups, notably the Waldensians, now constituted an independent offence…

Norman Cohn

Norman Cohn studied the evolution of the witch, beginning with the first records of trials of Waldensian heretics in the French and Swiss Alps from the 1420s onward. The mythical typical witch appeared as the result of an amalgamation, in the minds of judges, of folk-beliefs such as night-flight and magic spells, and adoration of Satan by the witch in which a demonic pact was concluded. The judges knew heretical sects like the Cathars whom were supposed to worship the Devil, and whose believers practised various skills the Church had neglected as worldly. They feared that some of these heretics had escaped to practise in secret. Tortured victims confessed to what the interrogators wanted to hear. So, from the trials themselves, the witch as a village shaman or refugee Cathar healer or artisan was revised into the accepted stereotype. Robert Muchembled agrees saying “testimonies were an amalgamation of… superstitions with the Satanical antireligion of the demonologists”.

Judges seem to be imprinting the answers to their questions in the defendant’s head…

If witches met in secret nocturnal assemblies to carry out what the judges considered inversions of Christian worship, and orgiastic sex, then they were indeed still practising the heresy that had earlier been categorized by the same behaviour. This was the original belief, and the intention was to catch them, but the failings of inquisitorial methods and the wider acceptance of the ideas of the Malleus Maleficarum led to the mass witch-hunting of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the heretics for Catholics were Puritans, and for the Protestants were Catholics. The use of torture to extract confessions, and to make the suspects name names ensured the more trials there were, the more suspects were generated, and the hunts were not clearing up witchcraft but seemed to be spreading it wildly as a result of the legal methods used—it was impossible to prove innocence. They also elicited closely similar confessions of group diabolism from a wide range of otherwise unconnected victims, and perpetuated the fear of a hidden, secret, malevolent society even when it did not exist.

By the fifteenth century, the Catholics had succeeded in driving the heretics underground, and the expressions Vaudois and Cathari were rarely heard. H R Trevor-Roper writes on the relationship of heresy and witchcraft:

To the Dominicans the two forms of error were inseparable. One continued the other, and the pursuit must not cease when the formal error had been driven underground.

So, pope Innocent VIII’s famous bull give the approval of the Church to witch hunting, allowing it to run amuk. Sorcerers and witches were the enemies of Christianity—nothing that the bible does not say in essence, just as apologists claim—but by issuing it, the pope was lashing the clergy everywhere to the attack on witches. Adrian VI followed this up, in 1521, with a decretal epistle denouncing the witches…

…as a sect deviating from the Catholic faith, denying their baptism, and showing contempt of the ecclesiastical sacraments, treading crosses under their feet, and, taking the Devil for their Lord, destroyed the fruits of the earth by their enchantments, sorceries, and superstitions.

By specifying the evil practices charged against the witches, the popes affirmed their reality. Europe again stank with burning flesh and echoed with the groans of tortured women. The Inquisition was fighting an organized conspiracy led by the Devil. Witches were incorrigible. All that could be done was to kill them. Only after the publication of the Malleus at the end of the fifteenth century did the worst horror began. Most witch hunts were not lawless mobs but were systematically organized by rulers and government officials. By the early sixteenth century, heresy was out of hand. The Reformation was gaining momentum and the Inquisition concentrated on the matter in hand—prosecuting heretics—Protestants. Witches never came high in its list of suspects except when the inquisitors deliberately created a panic, as they sometimes did.

Malleus Maleficarum was the first well-read inquisitorial manual published. It looked authoritative and was widely distributed. Said to have been approved by the University of Cologne albeit with reluctance and hesitation, it was one of the first books to be printed on the recently invented printing press and was reprinted fourteen times before 1520, appearing eventually in 20 editions. The first two parts of the book deal with the reality of witchcraft as established by the bible, as well as its nature and horrors, and the manner of dealing with it, while the third lays down practical rules for procedure whether the trial be conducted in an ecclesiastical or a secular court. The witch-trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mostly in secular hands.

All physical actions were either caused by God or by his enemy the Devil through the actions of angels or demons, but God approved everything that happened, even evil actions:

But the providence of God wished that by the example of Job the power of the devil even over good men might be manifested, so that we might learn to be on our guard against Satan, and, moreover, by the example of this holy patriarch the glory of God shines abroad, since nothing happens save what is permitted by God.

Malleus Malificarum

It conveniently justifies any evil action directed against witches by God’s agents on earth, the clerics. The book was to become the most influential and widely used handbook on witchcraft, and the publicity inflamed the popular imagination. It declares the witch to be a servant of Satan and soundly bases it in Church philosophy:

Hence it follows the Catholic teaching, that in order to bring about evil a witch can and does co-operate with the devil.

Another papal bull in 1488 claimed the Church of Christ was “imperilled by the arts of Satan”. The papacy and the Inquisition had miraculously materialised witches from nothing. The Church had denied they were real but now they imperilled us all. What was nothing but a delusion was now the antithesis of Christianity.

Witchcraft was worse than heresy, and was antipathetic towards women. Christians today are rightly appalled at Moslem honour murders of their daughters or sisters, but, in the Alphabet of Tales, a Christian father publicly murdered his daughter because he would rather be known as the slayer of a virgin than the father of a strumpet. Women in Christendom were “bitterer than death”, as Krämer and Spenger put it. They were considered worthless. Though written by inquisitors, the Inquisition censured them only a few years later and rejected the book. Secular courts, not inquisitorial ones, used it—but that was the intention.

Inquisitors are told in the book to ask at the outset “whether or not the person on trial believes in witchcraft”. It notes “that witches generally deny the question”, but if they did they were doomed, for the book declares:

A belief that there are such things as witches is so essential a part of Catholic faith that obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion savors of heresy.

Krämer and Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum

If the accused said they did believe in witches, then the Inquisitors asserted their right to find precisely what they believed about them through torture. To refuse to confess was the crime of maleficium taciturnitatus. So there was no defence, and the best that could be done was to confess at once to end the farce with minimal torture, and a possibility of life imprisonment. Torture crippled everyone leaving them unfit for work and unable to enjoy life even if released. Death was preferable to torture.

The book recommends that the Inquisition’s judge or a confessor speak privately with the suspect to obtain a confession by promising a pardon using the words:

If you confess, I shall not condemn you to death.

Nor would he because the sentence would then be pronounced by a fellow Inquisitor. As a crimen atrocissimum and crimen exceptum, all spirit of the law was suspended in witchcraft trials leaving mere formalities to save the Church’s face. Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) explained that the accused person had to be treated “simply and squarely, without the noise and form of lawyers and judges”, and Pope Eugene IV. (1431-1447 AD) told the inquisitors in a circular letter to proceed “summarily, without ado, and without any judiciary form”.

A popular apology used of the Inquisition is that it was mainly conducted by secular courts, and of those conducted by the church only a tiny percentage were by the Inquisition. All the time, the Church maintained the pretence that ecclesia non sitit sanguinem, “the Church does not thirst for blood”, handing over any witch given capital punishment to the secular authorities for judicial murder. This excuse depends on the church being considered peripheral to society, as it is today for many people, but was not then. Everything centered on the Church, and the Church could have stopped any of the cruelties had it declaimed clearly against them, as Abbot Regino knew. It did not. It fed them with papal decrees, inflaming popular outrage.

Lady Alice Kyteler

An early case of witchcraft was in Ireland. In 1324, Lady Alice Kyteler, or Kettle, was a noblewoman, who was arrested, with her son, daughter and others, and tried by the bishop of Ossory in his ecclesiastical court for worshipping a deity other than the Christian God. It seems she did not deny it. She is said to have held a ritual at a crossroads, and sacrificed a red cock. A pot of ointment found in her room was declared to be witch ointment, made of the blood and fat of murdered children to give witches the power of flying through the air on a broomstick. The inquisitor found she had had criminal intercourse with the Devil, whose name is given as Robin Artison, and she was condemned. Lady Alice was smuggled away to England by her noble friends but a young woman associated with her was executed. The story shows the Church ultimately getting its way against an admirable disdain shown by the Irish Norman officials in those days, and also a good deal of bravery by the Catholic bishop.

Lady Alice Kyteler was a rich woman married to Sir John Poer, her fourth husband. Kyteler and her family seem to have been unpopular either through their wealth of their overbearing behaviour. When Richard de Ledrede, the English bishop of Ossory, made a visitation to his diocese he found himself faced with complaints of witchcraft from five knights and many other nobles of Kilkenny.

The bishop proceding, as he was obliged by duty of his office, found a certain rich lady, called the Lady Alice Kyteler, the mother of William Outlawe, with many of her accomplices, involved in various such heresies.

William Outlawe was her son by her first husband. Ledrede had been consecrated bishop of Ossory by pope John XXII, the pope that had issued the first bull against witchcraft, Contra mago magicas que superstitiones. This pope had ordered an inquiry into magic in the papal court on 27 February 1318. In August 1320, he granted the inquisitors powers to act against all who might sacrifice to demons or worship them, make pacts with them, or made images to control them, making use of the consecrated host in doing evil, and other acts.

Kyteler’s group, included William Outlawe, decribed as a banker, Robert de Bresto, John Galrussyn, Sysok Galrussyn, William Payn of Boly, Petronella de Meath and her daughter Sarah, Alice the wife of Henry the Smith, Annota Lange and Eva de Braunstoun. The charges included:

• denying the faith of Christ and the Church, not worshipping the body of Christ and not hearing the mass or receiving the sacrament,
• propitiating the demon, Robin Artisson, Robin filius artis (“one of the poorer class of hell”—mocking the name le Poer?), by sacrificing animals and scattering pieces of them at crossroads,
• seeking advice from demons,
• using the church for nocturnal meetings in which candles were burnt, and eventually extinguished to the call of, “Fi! Fi! Amen”,
• making powders and ointments of ingredients like the flesh of unbaptised children, worms, herbs, and the intestines of cocks all boiled in the skull of a beheaded robber.

Lady Alice was specifically charged with murdering her husbands and attempting to poison slowly Sir John le Poer, who, being forwarned, took from her the keys to boxes she kept locked, finding various of the ingredients mentioned, and an ointment with which she greased a staff, or some said a beam of wood, which she and her friends then sat astride and galloped “through thick and thin”.

Kyteler is usually said to mean “kettle”, but it also meant “tickler” (Stop yer kittling, Jock!), in the sense of someone arousing to emotion as well as simply tickling, and sounds as if it might be the nick-name of a woman who had excited the attentions of four husbands. Kittle is also an old English rendering of kitten—a small cat!—a diminutive of Cathar? The demon Robin appeared as a cat, a dog or a black man—described as an Ethiopian—and had two black companions each carrying an iron rod.

Under the Normans, sorcery was a secular crime, and the bishop could not proceed without the support of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, who had to issue a writ for the arrest of the witches. A snag was that the Lord Chancellor was Roger Outlawe, a relative of William. Moreover, Arnald le Poer was Seneschal of Kilkenny, and the two of them asked bishop Richard to withdraw the chatges. He refused. They thought the bishop was bypassing the law of the land, but he blustered that the services of the Church were more important than secular law.

Not getting any assistance from the Lord Chancellor, the bishop ordered Lady Alice to appear before the bishop’s ecclesiastical court, but she declined to, declaring the charges beyond the Church’s jurisdiction. Sitting in her absence, the court excommunicated her. Arnald le Poer went in person to ask the bishop to lift the sentence, but found the bishop immoveable and left in anger. The next day, Stephen le Poer, an officer of the Seneschal, arrested the bishop and confined him to Kilkenny Castle. The bishop raged he had been imprisoned “at the instance of sorcerers and heretics”. The imprisonment of a senior divine by a secular court was quite unusual, and many of the faithful visited him with food and comfort, taking away the bishop’s messages of outrage. The response of the Seneschal was to hold him incommunicado. The bishop responded in return by placing the whole diocese under interdict, equivalent to excommunicating the whole population, and denying them therefore the security offered to their souls of masses and wafers. It was a real threat to people who had been taught to believe in these superstitions, and so was normally effective in raising a population against its secular ruler. Notionally, it was worse than death in that it condemned people’s souls to eternal torture.

The secular authorities still seemed undeterred and the Seneschal asked people to come forward with complaints they had against the bishop, but no one had the courage to do so, or the bishop had been exemplary in his dealings. The former is more likely because, in fact, on other occasions the bishop was obliged to appeal to the king against such charges. William Outlawe then produced one, a deed stating that the bishop had defrauded a widow of her husband’s inheritance. The bishop’s supporters called it a forgery.

Eventually, after 18 days, the bishop was released on bail, and he marched in procession with his following of nuns, monks and priests, and in full regalia to his palace. There he issued again a demand that William Outlawe should appear before the ecclesiastical court. In this time, the secular officials had appealed to the king, and a royal command arrived ordering the bishop to appear before the Lord Justice of Ireland to explain why he had placed the diocese under interdict with the danger of causing local disaffection. His own superior, the Archbishop of Dublin, also ordered him to appear before his representative and explain his actions, but he declined on the grounds that it was too dangerous for him to travel. The interdict was withdrawn, apparently, over his head.

The bishop dressed again in his full grandeur and in his panoply, once more accompanied by monks and priests in procession, burst into the judicial hall of Kilkenny where Arnald le Poer was presiding. Waving the body of Christ in a golden cup before the tribunal, he demanded to be heard but was ejected. However, after some pleas were made in his favour, he was allowed into the court as long as he stood at the bar, what is now called the dock, where the criminals stood. Solemnly he pronounced that the body of Christ he held before them had never been treated in such a way since Pontius Pilate. The witches would have to be delivered for punishment. The Seneschal again refused. Ledrede argued:

You, Sir Arnald, are a knight and instructed in letters. And that you may not have the plea of ignorance in this place, we are prepared to show in these decretals that you and your officials are bound to obey my order in this respect, under heavy penalties.

But the Seneschal was unimpressed:

Go to your church with your decretals and preach there, for here you will not find an attentive audience.

After reading out the list of criminals and the charges against them, the bishop and his retinue left the court. Soon Sir Arnald le Poer had the bishop summoned to answer charges before the Parliament in Dublin, where Lady Alice Kyteler indicted him for defamation. The Dublin clergy were not sympathetic to the bishop whom they believed had been sent from England by the pope to prove that the Irish harboured heretics! They called him a “truant monk from England” sent to implement irrelevant papal bulls with excessive zeal.

Despite this the bishop was courageous and persistent, and eventually succeeded in turning events his way. In the end, he brought the accused to an ecclesiastical trial, where most were found guilty and imprisoned. Lady Alice is said to have confessed to heresy and obtaining wealth through the witchcraft of conjuring a demon. But while she was on trial, she escaped to England, helped by her noble connexions. Her son William Outlawe was convicted of witchcraft but was too powerful a knight to be forcibly arrested, though he eventually agreed to serve a voluntary sentence, and was pardoned as soon as some lesser figures had confessed and been condemned to the stake. He agreed to a an expensive penance of covering the roofs of the cathedral and the chapel of the holy virgin with lead within four years.

Petronella de Meath was publicly whipped six times then burnt at the stake—the first witch burnt in Ireland—after confirming in her confession all the charges and people involved. She referred to Lady Alice as “La Kyteler”, saying she was the teacher of the witches. The effects of the ointments she helped prepare “made the faces of certain ladies appear horned like goats”. It sounds like the psychedelia caused by LSD-like drugs. She also confirmed acts of congress between Lady Alice and the demon, Robin filius artis. This confession seemed to satisfy the bishop. He had his victim, and evidently had proved whatever point he had been sent to prove.

The Seneschal of Kilkenny was accused of heresy, excommunicated and imprisoned in Dublin Castle. Ten years later, when Roger Outlawe became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, he tried to release Sir Arnald, but the bishop immediately accused him too of heresy, and of abetting heretics. Before any further moves were made, Sir Arnald died still imprisoned. Later Ledrede was himself charged with heresy, and was obliged to flee to Italy and seek shelter with the pope.

The bishop of Kilkenny, reporting the case of Alice Kyteler, spoke of “this new pestilential sect”, suggesting it was seen as a new phenomenon, and other clerics of the time confirm it as a phenomenon of the fourteenth century or second half of the thirteenth century. When the persecutors were active at Berne in 1337, they complained that the pest had haunted the city “about sixty years”. The Dominican inquisitor, Jaquier, spoke in 1458 of this “recent” sect which held “synods of the Devil”, and ended its meetings with orgies. The inquisitor, Bernard of Como, wrote that the secta strigarum, the witch sect, arose in the first half of the fourteenth century.

Witchcraft and Heresy

Witches were accused of heresy and heretics accused of witchcraft. Fire had been the punishment juridically appointed for witchcraft in the German secular codes of 1225 and 1275. The Church needed fire to purify heresy, and therefore witchcraft. From 1326-1500, the Inquisition was still not excessively concerned with persecuting witches. From 1300-1500, 702 executions are reported in the whole of Europe. The Inquisition was responsible for a fifth of them. Only after the Inquisition had put heresy on the decline did Catholics popularize the belief in witches. It was no coincidence, as a few historians have tried to point out. Norman Cohn, in his book Europe’s Inner Demons, (1975) showed that interest in witchcraft occurred just where heresy had been strong—France, Holland and Flanders, northern Italy and the Rhineland.

Until 1484, the efforts of the Inquisition had been concentrated in the Pyrenees first, then the Alps, the mountain valleys where the heretics were taking refuge. Margaret Murray did not consider why witch hunts were confined to certain places and times, and why the pan-European witch-cult did not thrive in areas where it wasn’t persecuted. Witches were heretics not Pagans. In the Alps, in Lyonnais and in Flanders, witches are called Waldenses, and they met in Vauderye or Valdesia. In the Pyrenees, witches have the name “Gazarii”, a dialectal form of Cathari.

The main regions were mountainous or wild uphill country places where the hunted might take refuge. These were also intellectually uncultivated too, and the superstitions of the natives about the refugees were encouraged by the Church. The same syndrome as the “poor white trash” syndrome of the southern US worked here. The natives could look down upon the poor but industrious refugees as worse off than themselves when they betrayed them to the authorities as witches. Though the local peasant might be poor and ignorant, the charred corpse hanging on the stake was, like the strange fruit hanging on the trees of Mississippi, proof that someone else was worse off.

Inquisitor, Pierre Gui, tried 63 people for sorcery and witchcraft in June 1335. One woman confessed to having intercourse with a man dressed in skins who had breathed in her ear. She had been transported to a sabbat where she had worshipped a goat. The Satan of the middle ages was represented as a goat, whence the horns and the cloven feet. The Christians had chosen the image of the god, Pan, who had supposedly died when Christ was crucified. The woman believed in a king of heaven and a lord of the world. God and Satan were the two and were equal and eternal, each sometimes succeeding and sometimes losing. She thought, apparently, that Satan had the advantage and would be the ultimate winner. Others confessed to the same beliefs but adding that they ate babies and killed cattle. One said she had killed two aunts.

Would a man dress in skins and pretend to be a goat in the fourteenth century, primitive as it was? Perhaps. But then, perhaps he was dressed in sheepskin and had been pretending to be a lamb. Cathars followed John’s gospel, and every Parfait had to carry a copy of it. In the present version of John, Christ is depicted as the Pascal Lamb, so did a Parfait, perhaps at the “consolamentum”, take on a symbolic role as the Lamb of God? In 1303, the Bishop of Coventry was accused before the pope of doing homage to the Devil in the form of a sheep. The Church’s prohibition against representing the crucifixion as a lamb on a cross might have been because it represented just that primitive Christianity of the heretics that the Church wanted to erase. The inquisitors debased the lamb into a goat.

Inquisitor: Come now, good woman, are you sure this lamb was not a goat?
Tortured Victim: Certain! It was a lamb.
Inquisitor: Turn the screw.
Tortured Victim: No! No! Yes, it was a goat. Now I remember. A goat.

If true, it was a disguise or a costume. The disguised god seems to appear in other forms besides the goat or sheep, but it might be simply propaganda—the desire to debase the religion as much as possible—or simply abuse, just as calling the man a devil is. To call him a black dog or a black goat could simply be meant to be insulting. Cathar Perfects wore their hair long like Jesus and the Essenes, and without a tonsure unlike Catholic monks. Moreover, they always wore dark robes, it seems. Assuming they wore short pointed beards as was the fashion for much of this period—called by the French “un bouc”, a goatee—the description of black goat might have been a true one. The goat and sheep “devil” do not occur in the British Isles except in the case of the Norman Bishop of Coventry. They belong almost entirely to France and Germany. De l’Ancre:

It is always observable that at any time when he is about to receive anyone to make a pact with him, he presents himself always as a man, in order not to scare or terrify them, for to make a compact openly with a goat smacks more of the beast than of a reasonable creature. But the compact being made, when he receives anyone for adoration he usually represents himself as a goat.

In France, a goat was burnt to death at the sabbaths, the creature being called the Devil. If true, the goat represented the Catholic Church. H C Lea in his vast and scholarly works on the inquisitions and witchcraft “showed the gradual merging of sorcery and heresy”. Lea thinks these women were confessing to a debased Catharism mixed with sorcery. The last Cathar Perfects reported as dying in history were Pierre Autier (1310) and Guillaume Belibaste (1321), suggesting that the remaining scattered Cathars were left with no proper leadership and theology, unless some had gone underground. It took the Inquisition 200 years, from about 1230, to disinfect the Languedoc of Cathars. In this 200 years witchcraft made its appearance in Europe. By the end of the thirteenth century the Essenic dualistic heresy which had spread from Anatolia and Bulgaria to France was driven underground by the Inquisition or annihilated by robber barons. Witchcraft is not a continuation of an ancient Pagan religion. Witchcraft was the name the Church used against Albigensians and related heresies practising in secret.

The president of these sabbaths was always apparently a dark man. He will have worn a dark robe or suit. De l’Ancre speaks of the Devil wearing a black chasuble with three “bars”. The three bars will have been the Cathar Tau cross. The man this time apparently turned into a dog whose buttocks were kissed! Thomas Heywood (1574-1641), playwright and chaplain, tells us that worshippers at a sabbat renounce faith, baptism and eucharist, and worship “Lucifer” with contrary rites including “standing upon their heads”. This will be the Moslem form of supplication. Denial of the Catholic sacraments was part of the Cathar ceremonial, if the confessions are not just repetition of what the inquisitors wanted to hear. It does not seem impossible, given that the Cathars despised Catholic sacraments.

Even so, descriptions of the so-called Black Mass sound more like burlesque than anything meant to be serious. The heretics were mocking the god rather than venerating him, and, if the ceremony was based on the Catholic Mass, the mockery was to mock the god the Catholics served, whom the Cathars themselves considered to be Satan. The inquisitors had their equivalent theory of Catharism and were determined to put it over as a wicked conspiracy. The inquisitors believed that Satan was the god of the witches. In other words, the Catholic accusers of the Cathar witches claimed they were worshipping the Devil, when the Cathar witches were actually mocking the Catholic service of the Devil, as they saw it.

The Catholic ecclesiasticals cannot have been pleased to have been themselves accused by their opponents of Devil worship, and turned the tables on their opponents, but nor could they have been pleased that the people were willing to mock the Devil in the supposed Black Mass. The Church had a vested interest in having everyone terrified of Satan, and the Cathar attitude was contrary to their aims. It is distinguishing the Catholic theory, or calumny, and the truth about Catharism and then witchcraft, that is so difficult in practice. If Catharism had become debased by this time, was it truly debased or was it merely the Catholic justification?

If the Albigensian massacres and the inquisition had persuaded some scattered Cathars that Satan was winning the cosmic battle, would it have inspired them to join Satan’s side, in all sincerity? It might have seemed common sense in the awful situation they had experienced in the previous century, but it is difficult to imagine that they could have thus reversed their previous beliefs. Catholic propaganda still seems the likeliest explanation of supposed Satanism.

The earliest writings on the trials mention those held by Pièrre de Gruyères, a secular judge, at Berne in Switzerland from 1392-1406, and in the Valais (1428-1434), where 200 witches were put to death by the secular courts, and at Briancon, in 1437, where over 150 suffered, some by drowning. Others were victims of the inquisitors at Heidelberg in 1447, and in Savoy in 1462.

In 1390, the Paris Parlement had checked the persecution by transferring trials to the civil tribunals, but some decades later the clerics, who complained much of lay skeptics, returned to their work. The clerics regained power, and they made a fearful use of it. Curiously, in 1459, a massive trial of heretics, mainly Waldenses, occurred in Arras, considered a heretical town. Thirty two years later the dead heretics were exonerated, and the sentences declared illegal. The sequence of events was like this.

A professor of Paris University, W Adeline, was in 1453 brought before the bishop for denying the reality of witchcraft. In face of the terror, the scholar fell on his knees, weeping, and confessed that he was himself in league with the Devil and had trampled on the crucifix. He was leniently dismissed with a sentence of imprisonment for life.

At Douai, a woman was brought before the Inquisition on the ground that she was a Waldensian. In France, at this period, the crime of witchcraft was frequently designated as “Vauderie” showing that it was associated with the Vaudois, the Waldenses. She was forced to name names, and they in turn denounced others, until a large number of victims confronted the inquisitor. Under a promise of light sentences if they confessed, they all glibly agreed that they had gone to witch meetings on oiled broomsticks, had met the Devil in the form of a goat or ape, and had concluded with a general orgy. The savage inquisitor then handed them over to the secular arm, and they, protesting that they had been deceived into making the statements, said that it was all false. Nonetheless, six were executed.

The inquisitor, Pierre le Broussart, a Dominican, next year sought to repeat his triumph at Amiens, but the local bishop, who seems to have been a “sinner”, pooh poohed the story and discharged the accused. The inquisitor went on to Arras. In the absence of the Bishop, the inquisitor, cited a number of people before his tribunal and made them confess under torture—one woman was tortured fifteen times—they were associated with the Waldenses. Under torture, they denounced any acquaintance to get relief.

The judge promised to spare their lives if they agreed publicly to confess all the crimes of which the Waldenses had been accused. At a public meeting the accused appeared on a scaffold wearing caps exhibiting pictures of devil worship. They were asked whether they were guilty of worshipping the devil. All accepted they were, whereupon, ignoring his promises, they were sentenced and turned over to the secular arm to be burned alive. They shouted they had been cheated, and knew nothing of the crimes but had only confessed to be let off with a nominal punishment, as promised. They were executed in 1460 protestiing their innocence.

The fear of being accused of being a fellow traveller of the townsfolk and then being accused with them of witchcraft meant that none of their friends could have anything to do with them. No one wanted to deal with the merchants or artisams of Arras for fear of losing everything they had by confiscation, if they were accused. A large number of victims were condemned, and men and women fled in panic from the city, which actually lost its commercial prestige. One of the inquisitors was convinced he could tell a witch at first glance, certain that no one could be falsely accused of witchcraft, presumably because God guided such judgements. Later he was found insane.

Not one person in a thousand believed that it was true that they practised the aforeseaid witchcraft. Such things were never before heard of as happening in these countries.

Jacque du Clerq

Belatedly, the local Catholic bishop declared the persecution malicious—“a thing intended by some evil persons”, and a poet rhymed an accusation against the persecutors of framing the town for their own gain. The University of Louvain advised Philip the Good the witchcraft was imagined. The duke sent the King of Arms of the Golden Fleece to stop the persecutions. In 1491, the lawyers of the Paris Parlement took up the cases, analyzed the records, and found that the whole of them had been wrongly condemned, and by royal order this finding of the Parlement was nailed on the door of the bishop’s palace.

Except in England, torture was habitually used in the examination of witnesses, and the tortures were fiendish. There was one especially used for women accused of witchcraft. This was a chair the seat of which was either studded with spikes—one chair had two thousand—or was a metal plate under which a fire was lit. There the supposed witches sat until they either accused themselves or a neighbour of consorting with the Devil—or died.

The rise and decline of the European witch craze corresponds generally with the rise and decline of judicial torture in Europe.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

At Lindheim, where the most fearful persecution occurred, six women were executed because they confessed, under torture, that they had stolen the body of a child for purposes of witchcraft. After the execution, the husband of one of the women opened the grave and found the child’s body there untouched. The monk inquisitor declared the body to be a counterfeit made by the Devil and ordered it to be burned!

Protestantism and Witchcraft

The heart of the Protestant Reformation was a dispute over religious authority which grew out of the very conditions and abuses that had fostered earlier uprisings of heresy among the Cathars. … The witch craze was part of the Protestant battleground.

Peter Stanford, The Devil

For two centuries, the fourteenth and fifteenth, the mass persecutions continued mainly in the foothills of the French Pyrenees and the Alps—the machinery of the Church unrelenting against the Cathars—while elsewhere the persecutions were mainly of individuals, or, at any rate, small numbers of heretics or witches. In these years the Dominicans refined their demonologies, and, with the witch bull and its outcome, the Malleus Maleficarum, the Church presented its ultimate case for the world to act on. A new crusade in the central European mountains was demanded and granted, but the co-operation of the secular authorities was also demanded. The campaign was quickly to extend into southern Germany where the Dominicans found Luther. Meanwhile, in the Alps, it is a wonder the snows did not melt with the fires of burning witches. The Dominican inquisitor of Como claimed a thousand witches were burnt every year! The persecution extended down the Appenines into Italy, was taken up in the Pyrenees by the Spanish Inquisition and by the secular authorities in Germany.

Protestant leaders like Luther, took up the stance of the Cathars in their criticism of the Catholic Church. Luther, Calvin, and their followers believed in the power of the Devil as exercised through witchcraft and other magic practices, but Rome was possessed by Satan, and was the throne of the anti-Christ. Equally, when Catholics drove demons out of witches, they would scream out the name of some Protestant leader such as Luther as their ally! In his persecution of witches, Luther did not appeal to the papal Bull, but to the bible, and it was by virtue of the biblical command that he advocated their extermination. A large, if not the greater, share of the responsibility for the witch mania belongs with the Reformers. Catholic apologists are eager to state that Protestants were more active in hunting down witches in Germany than Catholics. Protestants were indeed worse. Rousseau says truly:

The Reformation was intolerant from its cradle, and its authors were universal persecutors.

Protestant persecutions are especially hypocritical because they were so contrary to the vaunted Protestant doctrine of the right of private judgement in religious belief! Nothing can be more profoundly cynical than to say that anyone may interpret the bible as they wish, then torture and kill them for having done so! Protestants began fighting for their own creed, and whenever it gained the upper hand, commenced to persecute the rest! Protestants by this time had accepted the Roman Catholic propaganda against witches, and had forgotten their origins in the Cathars—the first Protestants!

Charles V’s law, Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (1532), made sorcery, throughout the Holy Roman Empire (mainly Germany), a criminal offence, and, when someone was injured from it, the perpetrator was to be burnt at the stake. So, it did at least insist on evidence of harm before its harsh Roman codes of torture and punishment were applied. It was not enough just to confess to being a witch. But Luther and Calvin took the bible as being their authority and, for the next hundred years, their followers salivated their evil message of Exodus 22:18 from the pulpit. God had not insisted on any need to prove harm, like the Holy Roman Emperor. Just to be a witch was enough, and that meant in practice just to be accused of being one was enough. So it was that the Protestant evangelists extended the Roman Catholic Inquisition into areas where it had hitherto been laughed out of court. And Christians deny they are led by the Devil.

Lutheran evangelists spread their idiosyncratic brand of love throughout Germany and Denmark, while Calvinsts took theirs to Transylvania and Scotland. John Knox said the Scottish witch law was introduced “to please the Godly”, meaning who else but his own co-religionists. Knox personally saw a witch condemned in Saint Andrews in 1572. She was tied to a pillar of the church, obliged to hear the great man’s sermon, and was then burnt. She might have been relieved not to have to hear more, but Knox, like Luther and Calvin, remains an object of Protestant veneration no less than the Catholic saints like S Francis and Dominic Guzman.

In 1572, Augustus of Saxony imposed the penalty of burning for witchcraft of every kind, including fortune telling. In Osnabruck, Germany, in 1583, 121 people were burned in three months. At Wolfenbuttenl in 1593, ten witches were often burned daily. In the sixteenth century, there were cases in which witches were condemned by lay tribunals and burned in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome.

The witch hunts lost momentum after the Thirty Years War (Peace of Westphalia, 1648), which recognized religious pluralism. At the end of the seventeenth century the persecution almost everywhere began to slacken, and early in the eighteenth it practically ceased. Witch trials declined in most parts of Europe after 1680. Torture was abolished in Prussia in 1754, in Bavaria in 1807, in Hanover in 1822. In England the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished in 1736. The last trial for witchcraft in Germany was in 1749 at Würzburg, but in Switzerland a girl was executed for this offence in the Protestant Canton of Glarus in 1783—the last legal execution of a witch in Switzerland. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one last wave of witch persecution afflicted Poland and other areas of eastern Europe, but that ended by about 1740. The real purpose of it had been forgotten, and the imagined one was no longer credible, as the Enlightenment took a hold.

Testing Witches

George Ryley Scott says the the torturing of witches was one of the biggest warts on the face of Christianity. The Inquisition persecuted them but the Proestants of the Reformation were worse. Admissions, wrung from their victims by rack or thumb-screw, were described by these eminent Christian people as voluntary. Witches were supposed to have been marked by the Devil, so the first torture was to suffer the ignominy of an intimate strip search for the Devil’s mark. The witch was stripped naked and had all her hair shaved off in search for the mark. Few people do not have some sort of mark such as a mole or supernumary teat, and it was therefore usually found. These marks meant that the Protestant witch hunts did not need a confession.

There were two kinds of Devil’s marks—the visible and the invisible! Visible ones were warts, moles birth marks, supernumary teats or any other spot or callous. The invisible spots were, of course, more difficult to find. They had two noticeable characteristics—they did not bleed or respond to pain when they were stabbed with a long sharp needle. King James I, who opined in Dæmonologie (1597) that one in twenty of his subjects were witches, said the absence of bleeding in such circumstances was an infallible sign. So, the witchfinder took a long thin needle and stuck it into all parts of the woman’s body. Usually a bloodless or painless spot was found. There are places on most people’s bodies where there are few nerve endings and the needle might not cause pain. In other cases, the woman was simply exhausted by the torture of being stuck everywhere and did not cry out when she should have. The mark was sufficient proof, but there were usually a witness or two, or they could be procured.

In 1652, Michelle Chaudron of Geneva was accused of bewitching two young girls by their parents. The girls agreed that the woman had possessed them. Physicians were called and sought the Satanic mark on Michelle, using a long needle, but failed, the woman crying out constantly in pain from the torture. The doctors reported their finding to the judges, who were not satisfied, and ordered full torture of the victim. Under torture, she confessed, then while still suffering from the torment, the physicians again tested her with the needle, immediately finding a spot she did not respond to. Beccaria, reporting the case in 1785 noted:

The poor creature, exhausted and almost expiring from the torture, was insensible to the needle, and did not cry out.

Even in Britain, where there never was an Inquisition, witches were hunted just as they were in Europe. The Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, a Suffolk lawyer, was an expert in the use of the needle to find witches. He explained it all in his book, The Discovery of Witches. He murdered over 200 women in the years from 1644 to 1647. He succeeeded in finding witches so often because he had a trick needle, like the old fashioned toy knifes with the sprung blade that retracts into the handle under the slightest pressure. This needle was blunt and, seeming to penetrate deep into the skin without producing pain or blood, it was simply retracting into a handle.

Not all witch trials ended in deaths. In England, the absence of judicial torture made the cases less numerous than they were on the European continent, and only about 20 percent of accused witches were executed (by hanging). In Scotland, where torture was used, nearly half of all those put on trial were burned at the stake, and almost three times as many witches (1,350) were killed as in England.

The inquisitor, Johann Nider, investigating witches at Berne (1437), describes in his Formicarius or The Ant Heap based on the confessions of Swiss witches, that he refused to believe a woman who said she flew off to the sabbat. He told her she must tell him next time it was due so that he could observe the remarkable event. Sure enough, she told him and he went to her cottage to see her rub herself with an unction and fall into a trance, during which she made small involuntary movements. Eventually she woke up and confessed to the inquisitor she had flown to a sabbat. The Dominican told her she had never left her seat and must have dreamt the whole thing. Three hundred years later, the Duke of Newcastle in debate with Thomas Hobbes, was still having to argue that witches “imagine their dreams are real exterior actions”.

The Delusion of Satan

In New England, the famous Salem witchcraft delusion, in 1691—1692, led to convictions, but some of the accused were not convicted, and some of the convicts were pardoned. Even so, everything truthful about Salem is gut-wrenchingly awful and should be a clear warning about the dangers inherent in the Christian cosmography. Of the two hundred accused, denounced by young girls, nineteen men and women were executed, one man was pressed to death and one hundred and fifty people were imprisoned. Yet it all began innocuously in a girly’s prank.

Nine-year-old Betty Parris, daughter of the preacher Samuel Parris, went secretly with her eleven-year-old cousin, Abigail Williams, to a fortune-teller in January 1692. Fortunes at that time were often told by breaking the white of an egg into a glass of water and watching the shape it formed. The egg white made the shape of a coffin and the hysteria began. Betty Abigail and others were described thus:

Getting into holes, and creeping under chairs and stools, and [began] to use sturdy odd postures and antic gestures, uttering foolish, ridiculous speeches, which neither they themselves nor any others could make sense of.

The subsequent denunciations led to the trials, torture and death of their decent, innocent neighbours. By the end of the grievous story, the five young children of John and Elizabeth Proctor had been left destitute at the deaths of their parents, because charges of witchcraft involved confiscation of property—a possible motive for the charges. Seventy-year-old Rebecca Nurse—celebrated for her kindness among locals, who got up a petition on her behalf—was horribly executed. A four-year-old child, Dorcas Good, accused of witchcraft, was imprisoned, went mad from being chained to a wall for eight months, and never recovered her wits.

Frances Hill’s A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem witch Trials is a useful reconstruction of the evidence.

In the end the hysterical and malevolent girls began to denounce the rich and powerful and met with sterner resistance. Finally, in 1706, Ann Putnam, one of the leaders, made a public statement of apology at the age of twenty-six:

I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling providence that befell my father’s family in the year about ’92 that I, then being in my childhood, should, by such a providence of God, be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them… I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them, but what I did was ignorantly being deluded by Satan.

The astute reader will note that Ann Putnam did not regard herself as responsible for her own actions. One of the worst aspects of Christianity is that it absolves people of personal resposibility for their evil intentions and acts, and subjects even adults to the delusion that demons control us. Often evil people claim to be acting on direct instruction from God!

Witch-hunts are still with us. Parents are accused by their children at the instigation of the new priesthood, the psychotherapists, of sexual abuse. In Britain there are waves of hysteria periodically induced by child psychologists or sociologists about Satanic rituals involving children. Satan is a figment of Judaeo-Christian mythology, and if these things really happen the culprits are perverted Christians. In fact, charges are seldom brought and on occasions when they have been, have proved disastrous for the law and the social service departments of our local authorities.

In the United States the religious right tries to be polite about hunting out the modern witches of natural science who want to teach evolution. It is a “third wave” of witch-hunting after Salem itself and McCarthyism. When will people condemn all this nonsense?

A vast amount of authority for the belief in witchcraft may be quoted, but the evidence for what is claimed is negligible, especially when the confessions of the victims of torture are discounted. Nowadays, it is all harmless imaginative reading for children who are Harry Potter fans, but if J K Rowling had her little hero burnt at the stake, in her stories, as he would have been in fact, there would be an outcry from alarmed parents.

Further Reading

• Thomas Wright on witches
• More on the Millennium, when Christ failed to return, and notions of heresy began to take hold in the West
• More on the persecution of heretics
• More on documents pertaining to heresy
• More on the Spanish Inquisition
• More on Catholics who still excuse the Spanish Inquisition