Abstract

In times past, massacre, genocide, extermination have, horrifically, been carried out time and again for the sake of some alleged “higher” end—usually religion, often used as a veneer on economic expansion and imperialism.

John Bowden

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

Witch Hunt to Holy War

Protestantism found the source of truth in the individual soul. A man could guide his own life, Protestants held, and have a certainty that in so doing he was right. Truth and reality become subjective. The moral and material chaos of the modern world is largely a result of Protestantism, of its individualistic, its lawless, its anarchical character.

T M Coates, Ten Modern Prophets

The religious reformers brought no relief to the witches of Europe. The reformers were no less hostile to witchcraft than the Catholics. Luther did not believe in witches flying to the sabbath, but he did believe in magical powers and in the Devil. The Protestant emphasis on the Devil and on the bible explicitly condemning the witch to death caused no less cruelty in Protestant countries than in Roman Catholic ones.

I would have no compassion on the witches. I would burn them all.

Martin Luther

Marion L Starkey, in The Devil in Massachusetts, says bluntly that “pity was not a Puritan virtue”.

The real cause of the hysteria against heresy, now more politely called nonconformism, is evangelism. Heresy is the logical consequence of self-righteous proselytism. When the evangelicals meet up with people of a different persuasion, their ultimate response, given the opportunity, is to destroy them. The reason is plain. If they do not the alternative might prove more attractive to the people, the potential converts, and the evangelist might be forced out or to convert themselves to the views of their opponents. People who believe passionately that they are right will not just give up. All devout religious people think they, and only they, are right. It follows that they have God’s sanction for killing their opponents who are wrong. Not one of them will consider that either they are deluded or that they are misled by the Devil they believe exists but dispise. It is always God who speaks to them in their heart, never the other one. They easily persuade themselves that they are fighting for God—Almighty God who could wipe out the universe with a word!

Their only justification is that the enemy is Satanic. The evangelical enemy is always the “Axis of Evil” or the “Evil Empire”, and they alone are bravely standing up for right by chaining defenseless people to trees and burning them alive. They are always fighting a holy war, and are indignant that anyone else should claim the same. The Dominicans and Franciscans wanted to recover for Catholicism all the souls that had chosen Catharism. The Lutherans and Calvinists wanted to recover the Catholics of northern Europe. The Dominicans met stubborn resistance in a population in Languedoc that were certain the Catharist doctrines were better than the Catholic ones. The Protestants met similar populations in Germany that resisted their version of God’s plan. Just as the Catholic Church labelled the Cathars as heretics and physically exterminated them, the Protestants did the same.

John Knox lumped “the Devil, the Mass and the witches” together. James VI of Scotland, for whom religion was a tool of intrigue as much as a passion, called the Scottish witches papists. Lancashire was also called a center of “papists and witches”. “Witch” was a label that automatically condemned, just as the word “communist” would in twentieth century America, and it seems that “terrorist” will in the twenty first century. Such labels replace the need for evidence and therefore remove the need for justice. The Catholic fight back against the Reformation in the Counter Reformation used the same simplistic propaganda. De l’Ancre claimed the Basque witches were Calvinists, while Del Rio and Maldonado echoed the same view in Flanders.

Like all Protestants, Calvinists were Puritans. The word is the same as Cathari. The Protestant tradition was indeed the heretical tradition, but the Puritans did not want to be labelled as witches, and so they joined in the hysteria against them. The Reformers accepted the Catholic story, even while those called witches in Piedmont joined the Reformation as Calvinists, still believing in an Elect. Stapleton’s anti-Protestant tract was used by the German Lutherans against the Catholics, with the simple expedient of Changing “Luther” into “the pope” and “Lutherans” into “the Jesuits”. So much for the importance of their differences. The Lutherans left Stapleton’s attacks on the Calvinists unaltered. There is no honour among Christians.

In Spain, the Spanish Inquisition monopolized the persecution, and systematized it, tending to confine it to its central purpose of purging the country of Jews and Moslems. In the rest of western Europe, individual bishops, abbots, some inquisitors and some pious or opportunist barons all vied with each other, and the persecution was able to reach a level of mass hysteria. It was, though, the same plant as that nurtured earlier by the Church against heresy.

The most intellectual of men, mainly doctors, philosophers, civil lawyers and a few schoolmen, in the sixteenth century, spoke out against the witch craze. They attributed most of the supposed symptoms to mental illness, melancholia as it was then called, and needed treatment not torture. Among the bravest of men was a Lutheran, Johann Weyer who wrote in 1563 a work that did not deny witchcraft but insisted that the witches being burnt were ill or were the innocent dupes of demons. The reaction was mixed but many Catholics and Protestants alike denounced it. The Lutheran University of Marburg had it burnt. Later, king James I did the same. Even so, Weyer had a sufficiently favourable response to publish a new edition in 1577. By then a new witch hunt was in full spate. Jean Bodin denounced Weyer as a patron of witches and an accomplice of the Devil.

Weyer’s arguments were repeated by others in 1584 and 1585, before any Catholic writer attacked the obsession with witchcraft. In 1584, an English squire, Reginald Scot, denied all the alleged phenomena. Around 1585, the faculty of law at Heidelberg University opposed murdering witches on the grounds that “it is better to cure the soul than to torture and kill the body”. Then Catholic writers, the Jesuits, Tanner (1626) and Spee (1631), criticized the persecutions of witches.

The professional Christian clergy begged to differ. They swamped their voices, accusing them of witchcraft and being the Devil’s disciples, seeking to have them tried as the “chief cause of the increase of witches” as Bartolomeo Spina put it. Light was beginning to break into the festering dungeon of Christian cruelty and insanity, though, and ultimately the dark forces of Christianity were unable to stifle the Enlightenment—the force of reason. Christian fundamentalism now points us back to the dark ages. We have been warned.

The Jesuit evangelism of the Counter Reformation took witch hunts into Flanders, where Del Rio made himself famous, and Poland. By 1600, the civil lawyers, once among the skeptics, had been thoroughly converted by the newly profitable business.

In 1563, Scottish law prescribed death for all witches and even anyone who used them. Calvinism prevailed over sense. A similar law was introduced into Saxony in 1572. Other Europeans followed suit in the principalities where the Lutherans and Calvinists had been influential. The Church of England, being non-evangelical, remained sensible on the question of witches generally, but the Calvinists put it under pressure to conform with the “schools of Christ” on the continent. At this time, William Perkins who influenced the Pilgrim Fathers, preached that the “good” witch was actually “a more horrible and detestable monster” than the bad, and “a thousand deaths of right” belong to her. No one can read this and consider it anything other than total insanity. It reflects the complete reversal of justice that the disgusting Christian soldiers persuaded themselves was God’s war against Satan. It was obviously Satan’s war against God, and Satan’s main disciples now were the Protestant evangelists. In 1604, James I introduced the Scottish witch law into England. The Scottish prince had been educated by Calvinists.

Bishop Palladius, the Reformer of Denmark, declared Catholics to be witches, and had to be burnt “in these days of pure gospel light”. Bishop Jewel, from Switzerland, declared that Elizabeth’s England was full of witches—he meant Catholics. The worst witch hunts of England were in the Catholic counties of Essex and Lancashire, where the evangelicals had been compaigning most strongly. In Germany, the Protestants were most vigorous in Westphalia, where whole towns were depopulated. It had been a center of heresy since medieval times, and in the sixteenth century, a center of Anabaptism. The Swiss Protestants of Bern attacked the peasants of the Pays de Vaud. In France, the regions where the medieval heretics had been active became the center of activity of the Huguenots.

By this time, the end of the ferocity of the Counter Reformation, it seems likely that the target of both sides no longer existed in central Europe, except as each other. The Cathar heresy had by now been exterminated, or its remnants had joined the Protestants. The Vaudois of the Alps became Calvinists. What remained was simply a mania, with both sides now just murdering aged eccentrics, or half demented yokel women—now they were predominantly women—and each other.

In France, the south was Protestant and the north Catholic in the wars of religion. The Protestants took their stand in Languedoc. Across the Pyrenees, at the same time, the Moriscos or Conversos, the converted Jews, were expelled from Spain, and Pierre De l’Ancre accused Jews of murdering Christian children, declaring that they could never be converted into good Christians. Franciscan demagogues by the names of S Bernardino in Italy, and S Vicente Ferrar in Spain, had earlier inflamed mobs against the Jews as murderers of the Christian incarnated God, oblivious that without them God’s supposed plan must have failed, and so they should have been canonized for their holy actions and understanding. The Jews of Spain were told to clear off with nothing, or convert to Christianity.

Jews were not Christian and so could not legally be heretics and subject to the laws of Christendom, but, as Conversos, they were, and soon were blackening the market places with their unholy soot. Cardinal Ximenez was responsible for this level of Catholic cunning. All were Franciscans, so it was not only the Dominicans who were to blame for persecution. The Jesuits were to follow both. In 1609, De l’Ancre said the whole population of French Navarre were labelled as witches. He burnt 100 witches in four months about 1610. Many were burnt at Toulouse. John XXII had made Toulouse the center of witch trials, and it became the center of Huguenot persecution. In 1577, Pierre Gregoire, a lawyer, writes that the civic authority of Toulouse burnt 400 witches.

From about 1590 to 1630, every Catholic reconquest in the Counter Reformation led to a frenzy of witch burning. Catholic apologists say, by way of excuse, that everyone believed in witches, and Protestants burnt more. Protestants claim that Catholics started it, and they had been burning them for much longer. The Protestants, of course, were Protesting about all the paraphernalia that Catholics had unjustifiably added to Christianity, including the various demonologies that highlighted such things as the Devil’s mark, imps, broomsticks, and so on. The command of Exodus was sufficient for them.

Lawyers and Churchmen like Peter Binsfield, Peter Thyræus, Nicholas Remy, Henri Boguet and Martin Del Rio, as well as many minor authorities, wrote their sorry expertise on demons as replacements and updates for the older works like the Malleus. All agreed that to deny witchcraft is a sure sign of it. All must be burnt, and any evidence will do. Yet, despite the witch hunts they all accepted that witchcraft was growing incontrollably. It is because the authorities are too lenient!

Del Rio’s study, which followed the thesis of the Jesuit theologian, Juan de Maldonado, appeared in the first years of the seventeenth century, just when persecutions were becoming frequent in parts of Catholic Europe. Shortly after Del Rio’s work was published, some of seventeenth century Europe’s most intensive witch-persecutions occurred in those German Catholic states that had witnessed significant Protestant penetration, such as the bishoprics of Bamberg and Würzburg. Del Rio’s work certainly helped to provide the ideological justification for the persecutions, and it is likely to have confirmed the suspicions of the zealous witch-hunting prince-bishops that the Protestant presence in their lands had made the territories especially susceptible to the vice of witchcraft.

Del Rio, first warned his readers that heresy, magic and witchcraft were intrinsically linked:

• all heresy is prone to violence at the start, but because it cannot maintain this and cannot return to the truth whence it came, it degenerates into magic or atheism;
• magic follows heresy, as plague follows famine …We have seen heresy flourishing in Belgium and we see swarms of witches laying waste the whole of the North, like locusts… The heretics are strongly opposed by the Jesuits. This book is a weapon in that war.

Del Rio was at pains not to inflate Satan’s powers over God’s, and so become guilty of what the Church called Manicheism.

Del Rio is now being categorized as a great Jesuit intellectual who knew nine languages as well as philosophy and natural history, but before he gets far in this volume he tells us he sees “swarms of witches” where he lived. Will, the modern day apologists for Del Rio and his kind tell us what he really saw? The answer is that he saw Protestants—those called in Britain and the USA—Puritans. Puritan being the meaning of Cathar, Del Rio gives us a link from witches to Puritans to match the one we already have that matches the link between Catharism and witches.

Del Rio described the demonic exploits of the witches at the sabbat:

There, on most occasions, once a foul, disgusting fire has been lit, an evil spirit sits on a throne as president of the assembly. His appearance is terrifying, almost always that of a male goat or a dog. The witches come forward to worship him in different ways. Sometimes they supplicate him on bended knee; sometimes they stand with their back turned to him… They offer candles made of pitch or a child’s umbilical cord, and kiss him on the anal orifice as a sign of homage… Sometimes they imitate the sacrifice of the Mass (the greatest of all their crimes), as well as purifying with water and similar Catholic ceremonies… After the feast, each evil spirit takes by the hand the disciple of whom he has charge, and so that they may do everything with the most absurd kind of ritual, each person bends over backwards, joins hands in a circle, and tosses his head as frenzied fanatics do. Then they begin to dance… They sing very obscene songs in his [Satan’s] honour… They behave ridiculously in every way, and in every way contrary to accepted custom. Then their demon-lovers copulate with them in the most repulsive fashion.

Del Rio stressed that the witches’ activities represented an inversion and antithesis of the the norms of Catholic morality. By so doing, he emphasized the norms. The blasphemous, disorderly world of the sabbat constituted a complete antithesis to the kind of virtuous Catholic society that a Jesuit such as Del Rio wanted to establish.

Del Rio’s work was specifically concerned to aid and provide guidance to judicial authorities faced with the difficult task of prosecuting criminals who had committed secret, supernatural offences. Del Rio, together with Remy, Boguet and many other demonologists, believed that, like treason, witchcraft was “an extraordinary and exceptional crime”. Consequently, it was not subject to the normal rules of evidence. Ultimately, Del Rio relied dogmatically on the authority and infallibility of his Church, and tersely observed:

The Catholic Church does not punish crimes unless they are certain and manifest.

Testimony inadmissible in normal judicial proceedings, such as evidence provided by persons of bad reputation, criminals or accomplices, was acceptable. During the early seventeenth century, accomplice testimony and torture caused the spread of mass witch-persecutions especially in southern German Catholic regions. The accused denounced others whom they had supposedly seen at the sabbats. These denounced suspects were arrested. It was a chain reaction. The trials multiplied! Treatises like Del Rio’s were largely responsible. Yet, Del Rio was “not completely reckless”, according to Dr Robert Walinski-Kiehl, because he followed the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (1532) in that defendants should never be tortured on more than three separate occasions!

Hmmm! Del Rio also insisted that witches would remain silent during interrogations not because they were innocent and could say nothing, but because Satan made his adherents insensitive to pain! The logical conclusion is that torture is useless, but judges, convinced by Del Rio, concluded that excessively repeated torture was the only way to break Satan’s grip! Del Rio was a theologian and knew these things, so far as Catholics, happy to leave religious detail to their divines, and judges or otherwise were concerned. Del Rio gave Catholic magistrates the theological justification for exterminating witches and told them how to prosecute them.

Though considered erudite because of the vast compass of his sources, and a great Catholic intellectual, his own evidence is that he was a gullible twerp. He relates that two soldiers had shot at a fat drunken naked woman, and arrested her. Their explanation was that the woman had fallen out of a terrifying dark cloud gabbling human speech that had approached the men from a clear sky. They had shot at it and the woman had fallen out of it at their feet! She was presummed from this to have been a witch. The thought that the soldiers had to hide their crime of shooting a civilian woman was lost on the great demonologist.

Remy thought children should be burnt if they had a witch as a parent, and cited the biblical Elisha setting the she bears onto the children who called him “baldy head”. Remy sent 900 to the stake in Lorraine. Henri Boguet in 1590 reported that there were thousands of charred wooden stakes with burnt corpses hanging from them alonmg the sides of the roads in Lorraine. He had entered Lorraine from Germany where “the people were almost entirely occupied building fires for witches”. Remy is said to have burnt up to three thousand witches during his life.

Johann von Schoneburg, a patron of the Jesuits, won back his principality of Trier in 1581, and set about sorting out Protestants, Jews and witches. Between 1587 and 1593, in 22 villages, 368 witches were burnt. Before that in 1585, two villages were left with one woman only. A canon of the Church tells us this. The victims here, being religous opponents, not only witches, were of both sexes and all ranks.

Bishop Ehrenburg, prince of Wurzburg, burnt 900 people including nineteen Catholic priests and his own nephew in eight years (1613-1621). He accused children as young as seven of having intercourse with the Devil, and had them burnt. In other places children were burnt too, some as young as four! Many of the small prince-bishoprics of Germany disposed of 20-30 witches every year. Germany was divided into many such principalities then, only Luxembourg and Lichtenstein now remaining of them.

Bishop Johann von Dornheim, Prince of Bamberg, burnt 600 in ten years and had his own personal torture chamber decorated with verses from the bible. In all these cases, the victims were forced under torture to name names. A judge and chancellor, Dr Haan, under torture as a witch for leniency, named a burgomaster of Bamberg, Johannes Julius. The burgomaster was wickedly tortured himself, confessed and was subsequently burnt. While awaiting his fate, he succeeded in smuggling out of prison a letter to his daughter, Veronica. He confided his “acts and confessions”, for which he “surely must die”, saying:

They never cease to torture until one says something… If God sends no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burnt.

The Jesuits led this mania, but some of their order retained enough humanity to begin to entertain doubts. Frederick Spee von Langenfield declared that all of the witches he had condemned and burnt had been innocent because their confessions depended on torture. The book, Cautio Criminalis, in which he wrote this had to be published in a Protestant city, in 1631.

Torture fills our Germany with witches and unheard of wickedness, and not only Germany but any nation that attempts it… If all of us have not confessed ourselves witches, that is only because we have not all been tortured.

This did not impress Benedict Campzov, a Lutheran who must have read Spee’s work. Campzov rejected it, considering torture necessary to persuasion, even though it led to abuse and false confessions. He considered those who merely imagined the sabbats as just as guilty as those who actually went, because by thinking it, they proved their desire and guilt. The authorities on witchcraft for this Protestant intellectual were not the faithful ministers of the Devil who bravely defend his kingdom, like Spee, but were inquisitors like Spenger, Krämer, Bodin, Remy, and Del Rio. Campzov died in old age having taken the sacrament every week and read the whole bible 53 times. He also murdered 20,000 witches. Biblical fundamentalism led to these outrageous crimes by human demons dressed in the frocks of the Church, Protestant or Catholic.

By 1630, the slaughter had broken all previous records. It had become a holocaust in which lawyers, judges, even clergy themselves join old women at the stake.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

More witches were burned in Britain after the Reformation than before it. James I claimed that witches had caused the terrible storms that kept his bride in Denmark. Hopkins and other witchfinders were as bad as the Inquisition, though British Protestant law never permitted the tortures that Catholic countries permitted, and drove thousands of innocent men and women to false self-accusations, insanity, suicide and the scaffold.

The witch craze faded with the evaporating respect owed by people to their priests and parsons. That is why it began to fade in Protestant countries first. The Protestant ministers were no less fanatically anti-witch than the Catholic priests, but nonconformist people were more likely to be freethinkers than Catholics, and so less inclined to believe the lies of the clergy. Not all the laity were progressive, nor all the clergy reactionary. Spee was a Jesuit, and the later inquisitors were lawyers not monks, but it was a growing skepticism that weakened the fanaticism. The laity throughout were more skeptical of the madness, even though there were always enough of them who believed their clerical leaders to form a lynch mob when the clerics demanded it. Catholics and heretics alike believed in the kingdom of Satan, they merely disagreed on who its citizens were, and when the last heretics joined the nonconformists, the battle continued between the Catholics and the Protestants, each still claiming the others were Satan’s disciples.

By the time that the perverted priest, the Abbé Gibourg, and his gang of black magicians had been sent to the gallows in 1679, the bored nobility had turned witchcraft into a gothic amusement. The Hell Fire Club in the UK was the same sick game.

The bloody panic in Massachusetts under Cotton Mather in 1691-92 was the same madness. Cotton Mather notes, “The witches are organized like Congregational Churches”. Each Congregational Church has a body of elders who manage the affairs of the Church, and the minister who conducts the religious services and is the chief person in religious matters. Churches were originally independent. The witches had a body of elders—the Coven—which managed the local affairs of the cult, and a man who, like the minister, held the chief place, who was seen as a human God.

Finally, the Protestants had at least an inkling of their origins in heresy. They wondered what had happened from the time of the early martyrs in the Roman empire up to the time of the Protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century when the Roman Church held sway. Luther and others posited a “hidden church” that was indeed a continuity from the ancient Christians. Protestant Church history and martyrology were fully developed by the Protestant historical scholar, Matthias Flaccius Illyricus (1520-1575). In 1556, Flaccius published his Catalogue of Witnesses to the Truth, in which the hidden Church of Luther and the early Calvin was pictured in the medieval heretics who were those who, despite monstrous persecution, preserved the apostolic church from the fourth century to the sixteenth.

Peter Stanford, a former editor of the Catholic Herald, describes the primitive Christianity of the Cathars that survived at the base of Christendom in these words:

Their fascination and their ubiquity can be explained by the fact that they were an often ill-documented undercurrent in society, the other side of the coin to the official Church and its ally, the state, an umbrella under which sheltered the disaffected, the disappointed and those who thought there was a better way of organising the spiritual and material world.

The Devil

It was, in short, just like the gentile Christianity of the first century. The Cathars, Albigensians, Waldensians, and others were simply expressions of the original church which had obliged to remain hidden. And it was the Inquisition which persecuted the hidden church. More recently, books like La Résistance au Christianisme: Les hérésies des origines au XVIIIème siècle, by Raoul Vaneigem, confirm that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches never attained total acceptance anywhere, and that alternative expressions of faith and religious life ran through European history from the beginning.

The ancient heresies were never overcome by the crusades and tortures of the agents of the Catholic God of love, and persisted throughout the centuries under many intellectual and religious guises. When they emerged as Protestantism, they themselves attacked the unpolished remnants of their own kind left in the valleys. What they have failed to understand is that the Devil calls the tune whichever side you choose. It is patriarchal religion that is evil.

The Old Religion?

So, witches were not just crazed old women. The significance of the witch movement has been missed for a long time by scholars. Why did the authorities consider witches as so dangerous? Why did they replace traditional scapegoats like Jews and heretics?

The young women met the sentence of death in the same spirit as the female martyrs of the early Church, but one was possessed by the Devil and the others were possessed of the Holy Ghost! They spat at the religion of their Christian persecutors and said they had a higher religion and would die rather than abjure it. The Church demanded that they be tortured to extract “voluntary” confessions, but conversions obtained by torture were not admitted by the Church as sincere so the witches were put to death anyway. Most, therefore, would not convert and suffered death in silence, but some defied their torturers and cried out: “I die for a greater faith than Jesus”.

Behaviour like this implies that witchcraft was a religion. In Italy today, witchcraft is still called “la vecchia religione”—the old religion. The trial records (1575-1642) of the Benandanti of Friuli in northeast Italy, bordering the Venetian and Julian Alps, at first reveal the unadulterated tradition of the Benandanti. Benandanti literally means “the good walkers” or “good-doers”. They believed they fought for Christ under an angelic commander while the witches who opposed them fought for the devil. This is dualistic, and their name reminds us of the names of the Cathar Perfects, the Good Folk.

Both the inquisitors and the Benandanti believed in witches, but not the same beliefs. The inquisitors tried to show the Benandanti were the witches, but the Benandanti said they were not, but were fighting witches. Maria Panzona, an epileptic, in 1618, travelled on a cock to a sabbath presided over by the devil where she abjured the faith. At a later interrogation, she returned to her Benandanti belief:

I have never been a witch, I am a Benandanti… I have never given my soul to the devil, nor abjured my faith in Jesus Christ.

The issue of flight posed a problem because the Malleus Maleficarum had declared that flight took place in the body, but the Benandanti insisted that their soul left their body. The confession of Giovanni Sion, in April 1623, gave a full-account of a witches’ sabbath. Giovanni even admitted to having flown to the sabbath in body on the back of a lion after anointing himself with an oil given to him by the devil. In 1642, Michele Soppe was denounced as a Benandanti and painted a tiny picture of witches gathering on Thursdays, casting spells, eating and dancing, eating children, causing storms, and kissing the devil’s buttocks—he was in the form of an ass! Had the inquisitors manipulated the tradition of the Benandanti and made them into conventional witches? Or were the Benandante a relic of Catharism? They were purged into extinction by the mid-seventeenth century.

In the chief country of Catholicism, phenomena like these are recognized as the “old religion”. It means pre-Catholic Christianity—Catharism. Margaret A Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe argued convincingly that the old religion was northern Paganism, but Christian scholars maintained her case was spurious or overstated, and now it is a forgotten book. The power of the Church and its footsoldiers in academia to sideline and ignore critical work remains unbelievable in an otherwise rational world. Yet Murray was close to the truth. She concludes:

The evidence proves that underlying the Christian religion was a cult practiced by many classes of the community, but chiefly by the more ignorant or those in the less thickly inhabited parts of the country…

The god was worshipped in well defined rites, the organization was highly developed, and the ritual is analogous to many other ancient rituals… It was a definite religion with beliefs, ritual, and organization as highly developed as that of any other cult in the world.

The ignorant were, through the Church’s destruction of education, at least ninety five percent of the people of Europe, so the assertion is not surprising but other classes were implicated. In fact, the witch movement was often strongest and most widespread in the most enlightened or least illiterate, centuries of the Middle Ages.

But the evidence remains confused and care is needed in its interpretation. De l’Ancre tells us why. He says “there are two sorts of witches, the first sort are composed of witches who, having abandoned God, give themselves to drugs and poisons. The second are those who have made an express renunciation of Jesus Christ and of the Faith and have given themselves to Satan. These perform wonders”. Murray comments:

It was this body of persons who were specially stigmatised as witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to describe them the Christian recorders ransacked their vocabularies for invectives and abusive epithets.

Murray describes the organized religion that the Church was intent on wiping out, but it was not an ancient European Paganism but the heretical remnants of the Cathars. Witchcraft was organized heresy, a formidable revolt against Christianity. The confusion is with the old and mainly solitary witches, or witchdoctors who used herbs, drugs and magic to serve the local superstitious peasants. These old wisewomen and shamans had existed in Europe, as Murray says, since ancient times, and no one, even the Catholic Church, minded them because they were never a threat, despite their supposed magic.

Giroldamo Tartarotti-Serbati in 1749 and then Jacob Grimm in 1835 noted that the habits of witches, bizarre as they seemed, included elements that were relics of pre-Christian practice preserved as folklore. But Karl Ernst Jarke, a German lawyer, while editing the legal accounts of some witch trials in 1828, first suggested that witchcraft was the nature religion of the Pagan Germans. Undermined to such an extent by Christian propaganda and ignorance, its practitioners came to believe that their god was indeed the Christian Devil. As in the Pagan religions of classical times, the old God was defined as a manifestation of the Devil.

W G Soldan pointed out that any Pagan concepts that emerged from the reports of the trials were classical and oriental not Teutonic, as a “European” witch cult would require. Ronald Hutton wrote in his Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles:

By assuming that witchcraft and paganism were formerly the same phenomenon, [Wiccans] are mixing two utterly different archaic concepts…

The old solitary witches were not a religion, and any organization they had was mainly local contacts between them. What is true is that a primitive Christianity must have looked much more Pagan than the urbanised version of Catholicism, because it retained many of the original solar and seasonal rituals. Murray shows in her evidence that many of the spells they used invoked Christian saints and spirits, notably the Trinity. The true witches were as imbued with Christianity as society as a whole. Hutton adds:

I have never encountered anything remotely resembling Satanism in my entire experience of pagan witches. To do so would, indeed, be something of a conceptual impossibility, as belief in the Devil itself requires a Christian cosmology.

Hutton speaks of his experience of modern witches, and modern witchcraft is a modern invention based partly if not mainly on Murray’s ideas. But, as Hutton says, Murray was wrong in thinking the witches were Pagan. Witchcraft was not the ancient Pagan religion of Europe. People called “witches” were never organized until the thirteenth century, when they suddenly had a Europe wide organization. This widespread threat to Catholic Christianity only arrived on the scene when the Cathars had been driven underground by the Albigensian crusade and the Inquisition. Witchcraft indeed had a “Christian cosmology”, and knew Satan as a God. Modern Christians are no different except to pretend their Satan is not a god.

George Lincoln Burr, in the nineteenth century, was telling us that the witch craze was the extension of the Inquisition against the Albigenses. There might have been a demonic reason in the Church pursuing its opponents underground, but eventually the propaganda took over and any crazy reasoning departed. Only with the replacement of the old dualism with the God of reason and science was the witch mania made irrelevant.

Some historians still try to attenuate history. Robin Briggs has devoted many years to examining witchcraft trials in Lorraine in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, presenting his results in Witches and Neighbours. He began by being particularly interested in the initial depositions of witnesses and the first responses or confessions of the accused. In these late examples, Briggs noted that most witches were taken to court by their neighbours, not by witch-hunters. Village tensions were crucial. Someone had to suspect someone else of magic. In the end it was all a case of neighbourly dog-eat-dog!

Briggs argues that people in pre-industrial society universally feared magic. Faced with misfortune—disease, loss of crops or animals, impoverishment, or marital disharmony—they thought they could detect the source of the misfortune. Within peasant society the primary fear was of malefice, and it was that which lay as the heart of accusations of witchcraft. The suspect were accused of bewitching their neighbours. The normal remedy, within a village, was to demand that the spell be removed, or to procure the services of another witch that would reverse its effects. The Church offered a solution (that it imagined would bring into the open the hiding heretics)—the law! Once the witchcraft neurosis had been formed in the minds of people, those able to use the justice system, became excessively zealous against witchcraft, as in the rare case of the “village committees” of the Saarland.

Did pre-industrial people fear their neighbours' envy, believe they could use magical power, then suspect them of harming them by magic. Such a fear must always have existed, if it existed at all, but no direct evidence of it appears in medieval chronicles. As Dr Euan Cameron points out, the fear of malevolent neighbours could not have been an adequate explanation in itself, because the witch hunting was localised and sporadic in space and time. Across most of Europe, villagers remained hesitant despite legal systems which encouraged them to take action. Why does one village produce a clutch of trials, when nearby apparently identical communities have none? It suggests the legalistic response to witchcraft was acquired. Only when local officals or rulers were fanatical did persecution tend to get out of hand.

The neurotic reaction happened mainly near borders, particularly the borders of countries with different religions, and in mountainous areas. Northern Italy saw hundreds of witches killed, southern Italy, nearly none. In France, trials clustered around the German and Spanish borders, while central and north-western France had far fewer trials. Central Spain experienced little witch hunting, while the region bordering France had the largest craze of all.

Witches were called by demonic names pejoratively. Elsewhere and for long periods of time, despite the fear of magic there was no hysteria about it. People were nervous of it but not neurotic because they felt it could be handled, and actually handled it by using it. Magic could be used for good or ill in the popular imagination. Belief in healing magic was everywhere but blaming it on to demons was an ecclesiastical device to persuade the skeptical population that only the Church had the good magic. As the church succeeded, between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, in imposing the Catholic Christian vision of the world, it did so by diminishing the status of magical healers by accusing them and their heretical faith as witchcraft. The remnants of the heretics were then exposed publicly as “witches”.

Medieval literature on popular belief does not attest to a widespread witch hysteria until the Church generated it. In the earlier Middle Ages, mischief was explained by spirits, from the striga to the creatures whom the Benandanti fought in the sky. They were not purely malevolent spirits—some had good aspects. Christian theology levelled them to the rank of demons which meant nothing but harm. For many peasants, the power to perform malefice rather than the diabolical sabbath was what scared them. The depositions given at the trials in Canton of Lucerne from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century contained 130 accusations against 32 witches. In these depositions there is no mention of the Devil and without exception they all relate to acts of believed malefice. Not that the Church would mind, so long as heretics were going to the stake.

Alonso de Salazar, the sceptical judge of the Navarre witch-hunts, asserted, that there were neither witches nor bewitched until they were written and spoken of. So, he, at least did not see witch fear as being endemic in pre-industrial society. The great wave of panic on the Spanish side was instigated by a preaching campaign and the actions of the Inquisitors. For the rest, a residue of heresy must have still been evident, and Briggs says charges were built around the extensive local folklore of the region, again which doubtless pertained to the heretics. Cameron notes that teams of inquisitors turned some Alpine villages inside out searching for heresy in the 1480s, but found no mention of evil magic, only one vague threat of arson, which they duly recorded.

Briggs emphasises the complexity of the subject, but the complexity is later, as was his evidence, and mainly the result of witchcraft becoming a weapon in the religious wars, and personal vendettas. Initially, the purpose was less complicated. It was to net the escaped Cathars, and the peculiarities of witches were featured to make the local population of places where the refugees might be trying to settle, or even just passing through, react against them.

Witch hysteria was generated by the wider fear of demonic power ecclesiastics had been trying for centuries to instil. Just as the landscape slowly changes over the centuries, the persistence of clerical propaganda eventually shaped popular prejudice in parts of Europe where foreigners with mysterious habits and peculiar speech could cross borders and seem a threat to the natives.

Besides these factors, Pennethorne Hughes says the main evidence of a witch cult was of a late period when it was in decay. Many of the later witches, tried and hanged or burnt, were just local eccentrics, old shamans once valued for their remedies for sheep and cows, mentally ill, and disabled people, or worn out strumpets living out an isolated life of social disapproval. He writes about witchcraft:

Its organisation broken, it had become the individual habit of of miserable or malevolent persons… the witnesses were, as often as not, stupid, backward, or even deranged. The answers were made to leading questions. There had been overpowering moral suasion—often torture.

These are not likely to have been associated with heresy, unless they were when young, and had been left lonely and isolated through their devotion to chastity and with the torture and death of their friends. Most were just ugly, demented, unwanted and unpopular old people. It was the eventual realization that the people being cruelly murdered were just harmless unfortunates that led to the end of witch hunting. At the end, it was what it had been in the early years of Christianity. Individuals were being accused of casting spells to harm crops or cows. Where witchcraft still exists in the world, that is what it still is and has always been. Only in Catholic Europe was there ever a continent-wide witch cult.

Their role as healers was superseded. P Hughes, apparently a believer in magic charms, says “white magic” was never a part of witchcraft, but Reginald Scot proves him wrong. Reginald Scot commented on the Margaret Simons case of 1581, where the vicar John Ferrall “found, partly through his own judgement, and partly (as he himself told me) by the relation of other witches, that his said son was by [Margaret Simons] bewitched. Yea, he also told me, that his son (being as it were past all cure) received perfect health at the hands of another witch.” Scot used the term “witch” interchangeably of malevolent spell-casters and folk-healers, even at one point claiming that the term signified the two things indifferently.

Bodin confirms this and adds the utter senselessness of Christian thinking:

Even if the witch has never killed or done evil to man, or beast, or fruits, and even if he has always cured bewitched people, or driven away tempests, it is because he has renounced God and treated with Satan that he deserves to be burned alive… Even if there is no more than the obligation to the Devil, having denied God, this deserves the most cruel death that can be imagined.

Cathars were skilled healers, but any good they did was no mitigation when they were accused of witchcraft. Hughes also says that astrology was not witchcraft because kings and princes had court astrologers throughout this period, but astrology was evidence of witchcraft, nonetheless.

Cathar and witch healing by stones and herbs began to be irrelevant as the scientific revolution, which their careful practice of observing results had stimulated, took hold. The rise of scientific knowledge of the working of the human body, examination and medical practice sidelined the witch healers. Professional physicians and midwives displaced them. Once science took a hold in the eighteenth century, witchcraft ceased to be fearful. Instead large numbers of scientific quacks and mountebanks began to travel the country with their pseudo scienctific cures and nostrums.

As believers in a religion sincerely held, the Cathar witches were on a level with the Christian martyrs. But, while the Roman emperors put only a few hundred people to death and then to uphold secular laws, the Christian clergy made martyrs by the hundred thousand, if not the million, on purely religious grounds, many of them innocent practicers of herbal and mineral medicine. In Ireland, a witch was burned in a cottage at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Is there no Christian who can read this without weeping in shame and freely declaring:

No good god could possibly allow such things to be done in his name—even in human ignorance—and continue to trick us with the myth of His goodness.

A religion with the history of persecution of the Christian churches, Catholic or Protestant, cannot honestly claim to be a loving religion. Never let it be said that Christians follow the tenets of their god, as expressed in the Good News.

The Secret Doctrine of the magicians, they say, allows the self to identify with the cosmos. It is dualistic, making use of a law of analogy or equilibrium by which everything involves its opposite—the two are really one, like the two sides of a coin, or poles of a magnet. The believers in this principle know that the world cannot ever be good, because good and evil cannot be separated in the world of matter. Cathars believed only the spiritual realm was good.

But nor is the principle a reversal. If good and ill are inseparable in the world, it is not an excuse for saying there is no difference between them. Heads remains different from tails even though both are parts of a single coin. This is an argument of Christians determined to find the worship of Satan automatically in any dualistic religion. Christianity will not face up to the truth—that it is itself dualist! If some claim it is not, then it must be really two religions, a monist version and a dualist version. Supposed Christians, who believe in an evil lord called Satan, or whatever, who cannot be instantly defeated by God, and continues to cause havoc in the world, are plainly dualists. Pennethorne Hughes cites the former archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple (1942-1944) as writing:

Shelve the responsibility of human evil on a Satan, if you will. Personally, I believe he exists, and that a large share of that responsibility belongs to him and to subordinate evil spirits.

The fact that there are still over a billion Christians in the world, is a testament to their ignorance, their gullibility and their cowardice, and the brazen effrontery of the priests they believe are imbued with the same Holy Spirit as generations of torturers and murderers. They must only feel comfortable because they still think it was right and proper to kill witches as evil. The majority of US citizens today seem to regard Satan as more real than God, showing that they are reverting to the mentality of the Medieval Catholic Church. Everyone in the world who disagree with these Fundamentalists are not just wrong, they are evil! If this is not dualism, the Fundamentalist God is evil. That is why it is Christian priestcraft, despite its temporary human face, that is still the mask of the Devil.

Witches’ Names

Murray tries to make out that the given names of the female witches in the cases she examines are preponderantly Pagan. In fact the names support a Cathar origin most strongly. The most popular names are:

1. 120. Elizabeth, Elspet, Isobel (42), Bessie—Sworn to My God
2. 106. Joan, Jane, Janet, Jeanne, Jennet, Jonet—God’s Gift (Feminine John)
3. 76. Margaret, Marget, Meg, Marjorie—Pearl
4. 58. Marian, Mary—Bitter
5. 38. Katherine, Catherine, Kathren—A Cathar, Pure!
6. 35. Ann, Annis, Annabel—Grace
7. 21. Agnes—Pure, Chaste
8. 19. Ellen, Elinor, Helen—Belonging to the Sun
9. 17. Alice, Ales, Alison—Truth
10. 16. Christian, Christen, Cirstine—Belonging to Christ

Collette (10) was popular among the Channel Island witches. It is the female form of Nicholas which means “Victory for the People”. Murray does not look at the distribution of names in the general population in these years, but the evidence is still compelling. Mary ought to have been the most common in a Christian world, but it hardly occurs in Great Britain before 1645, while Marian is hardly used after that date. Marian is the earlier form. She notes there are no Teutonic names, and negligible Old Testament names. If Murray was right about the witch cult being northern Paganism, then Old Testament names would have been unpopular but northern and Teutonic names ought to have been popular.

The list suggests New Testament and Greek influence, the place where these meet being the Mediterranian, notably Anatolia and Syria, the home of the Paulicians. The most obvious direct Cathar connexion is the popularity of Katharine, and perhaps Agnes and Alice are of the same indication. Murray writes in bewilderment:

As regards the name Joan, I can offer no explanations or suggestions. I can only call attention to its overwhelming preponderance in comparison with the others.

She must be distinguishing here Isobel from Elizabeth. The explanation of Joan being popular is that the Cathars used the gospel of John exclusively. Joan is the feminine John. There are thirty three male witches called John, by far the greatest number in a much smaller sample. Examined in this way, the witch names cry out that they were neither ordinary Catholics or Pagans but were Cathars.

Further Reading

• More on the persecution of heretics
• More on documents pertaining to heresy
• More on the Spanish Inquisition, and Catholics who still excuse the Spanish Inquisition
• More on witches, and more, and more

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