From page 183 of Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly (1990, Beacon Press, Boston):
There are no complete records of the numbers of women killed as witches. See Matilda
Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State (2nd ed.; New York: Arno Press, 1972), p. 247;
edition first published in 1893. Gage writes: "It is computed from historical records that nine
millions of persons were put to death for witchcraft after 1484, or during a period of three
hundred years, and this estimate does not include the vast number who were sacrificed in the
preceding centuries upon the same accusation. The greater number of this incredible
multitude were women." See also Felix Morrow's foreword to Montague Summers, The
History of Witchcraft and Demonology (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1971), p. viii. He
writes: "The figures of scholars estimating the number of witches put to death vary
enormously, from 30,000 to several million, and it is really impossible to know, given the
records of the times, but it is clear that substantial numbers were put to death."
Rossell Hope
Robbins, in The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (New York: Crown, 1959), p.
180 gives a typical conservative estimate of 200,000.
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Witch Trials (Walker 1076-1090)
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live Exodus 22:18
Witchcraft was allowed through the first half of the Christian era. It was not called a "heresy" until the 14th century.
In 500 A.D. the Franks' Salic Law recognized witches' right to practice. In 643, an edict declared it illegal to burn
witches. In 785, the Synod of Paderborn said anyone who burned a witch must be sentenced to death.
The first major witch-hunt occurred in Switzerland in 1427. The persecution of witches reached its height between
1580 and 1660, when witch trials became almost universal throughout western Europe. (Grollier)
No certain figures exist for the exact number of people who were killed but some scholars put it as high as four
million. Significantly, 85 percent of those killed were women, varying in age from young children to old women.
Certainly some of these women were witches or thought they were, but by far the larger number were victims of
false accusations based on an excessive misogyny sanctioned by Christianity. (Young)
Traditional theology assumed that women were weaker than men and more likely to succumb to the devil. It may in
fact be true that, having few legal rights, they were more inclined to settle quarrels by resorting to magic rather than
law.
Geographically, the center of witch-burning lay in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but few areas were left
untouched by it. No one knows the total number of victims. In southwestern Germany alone, however, more than
3,000 witches were executed between 1560 and 1680. Not all witch trials ended in deaths. In England, where
torture was prohibited, 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. Some places had fewer trials than others. In the Dutch republic, no
witches were executed after 1600, and none were tried after 1610. In Spain and Italy accusations of witchcraft were
handled by the Inquisition, and although torture was legal, only a dozen witches were burned out of 5,000 put on
trial. Ireland apparently escaped witch trials altogether. (Young)
The chronicler of Treves reported that in the year 1586, the entire female population of two villages was wiped out
by the inquisitors, except for only two women left alive. A hundred and thirty-three persons were burned in a single
day at Quedlinburg in 1589, out of a town of 12,000. Henri Boguet said Germany in 1590 was "almost entirely
occupied with building fires (for witches); and Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villages on
their account. Travelers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes to which witches are bound." In
1524, one thousand witches died at Como. Strasbourg burned five thousand in a period of 20 years. The Senate of
Savoy condemned 800 witches at one time. Param stated that over thirty thousand were executed in the 15th
century. Nicholas Remy said he personally sentenced 800 witches in 15 years and in one year alone forced sixteen
witches to suicide. A bishop of Bamberg claimed 600 witches in 10 years; a bishop of Nancy, 800 in 16 years; a
bishop of Wurtzburg, 1900 in 5 years. Five hundred were executed within three months at Geneva and 400 in a
single day at Toulouse. The city of Traves burned 7,000 witches. The Lutheran prelate Benedict Carpzov, who
claimed to have read the Bible 53 times, sentenced 20,000 devil-worshippers. Even relatively permissive England
killed 30,000 witches between 1542 and 1736. The slaughter went on throughout Christian Europe for nearly five
centuries.
A directive published in 1599 said judges were bound under pain of mortal sin to execute witches; anyone who
objected to the death sentence was suspected of complicity. On one occasion, magistrates of Brescia objected to
burning a number of condemned witches without having examined records of their trials. But the inquisitors kept their
records sequestered, and the pope declared the magistrates' reluctance a scandal to the faith. "He ordered the
excommunication of the magistrates if within six days they did not execute the convicts".
Some witches even were made to repudiate the more impossible confessions extorted by torture, as a suicidal
device: "Through the temptation of the devil I made up that confession on purpose to destroy my own life, being
weary of it, and choosing rather to die than live." These abject recitations preceded the trip to the stake, for it was
common practice to silence witches on their way to execution, either by wooden gags, or by cutting out their
tongues, to prevent communication with the crowd. Inquisitors didn't want to give witches a chance to reveal that
they had been raped in prison, the usual practice of torturers and their assistants during preliminary "stripping.'
It can hardly be doubted that a major driving force of all witch hunts was sadistic sexual perversion. Torturers liked
to attack women's breasts and genitals with pincers, pliers, and red-hot irons. Under the Inquisition's rules, little girls
were prosecuted and tortured for witchcraft a year earlier than little boys - at 9, as opposed to 10 for boys. Witch
hunting generally was directed against the female sex, and the abject helplessness of imprisoned and tortured women
invariably encouraged sexual abuse along with every other kind of abuse.
From ruthlessly organized persecutions on the continent, witch-hunts in England became largely cases of village feuds
and petty spite. If crops failed, horses ran away, cattle sickened, wagons broke, women miscarried, or butter
wouldn't come in the churn, a witch was always found to blame. A woman was convicted of witchcraft for having
caused a neigh- bor's lameness-by pulling off her stockings. Another was executed for having admired a neighbor's
baby, which afterward fell out of its cradle and died. Two Glasgow witches were hanged for treating a sick child,
even though the treatment succeeded and the child was cured. Joan Cason of Kent went to the gallows in 1586 for
having dry thatch on her roof, which sparked when burnt.
Witch burning.
The Evil Book of the Dominican Inquisitors
The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Sorceresses), appeared in Germany in 1486 and became the authoritative
handbook describing the activities of witches and how to convict them. It was written by two Dominican Inquisitors,
Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. The mysogyny of this text is hysterical in tone and its authors are fixated on
sexuality. Its publication in 1486 helped to accelerate the killing of so-called witches in three ways: (1) by increasing
the number of people who could be accused of witchcraft, (2) by increasing the geographical area of the persecution
to include most of Europe, and (3) by focusing attention especially on women. (Young 79)
"There are also others who bring forward yet other reasons, of which preachers should be very careful how they
make use. For it is true that in the Old Testament the Scriptures have much that is evil to say about women, and this
because of the first temptress, Eve, and her imitators; yet afterwards in the New Testament we find a change of
name, as from Eva to Ave (as S. Jerome says), and the whole sin of Eve taken away by the benediction of Mary.
Therefore preachers should always say as much praise of them as possible. But because in these times this perfidy is
more often found in women than in men, as we learn by actual experience, if 2nyone is curious as to the reason, we
may add to what has already been said the following: that since they are feebler both in mind and body, it is not
surprising that they should come more under the spell of witchcraft. ... And proverbs xi, as it were describing a
woman, says: As ajewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion. ... But the natural
reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted
that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the
breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect
animal, she always deccives. For Cato says: When a woman weeps she weaves snares. ... And it is clear in the case
of the first woman that she had little faith; for when the serpent asked why they did not eat of every tree in Paradise,
she answercd: Of every tree, etc.- lest perchance we die. Thereby she showed that she doubted, and had little faith
in the word of God. And all this is indicated by the etymology of the word; for Femina comes from Fe and Minus,
since she is ever weaker to hold and preserve the faith. And this as regards faith is of her very nature; although both
by grace and nature faith never failed in the Blessed Virgin, even at the time of Christ's Passion, when it failed in all
men." (Malleus Maleficarum 44.)
"To conclude: All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs 30: There are three
things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb.
Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils" (Malleus Maleficarum 47).
The Malleus Maleficarum, said the accused witch must be "often and frequently exposed to torture. If after being
fittingly tortured she refuses to confess the truth, he [the inquisitor] should have other engines of torture brought
before her, and tell her that she will have to endure these if she does not confess. If then she is not induced by terror
to confess, the torture must be continued." If she remained obdurate, "she is not to be altogether released, but must
be sent to the squalor of prison for a year, and be tortured, and be examined very often, especially on the more Holy
Days."
Doctors, Midwives and Healers
The Malleus Maleficarum served to put a large number of women into immediate jeopardy by stating that the
activities of midwives can reveal signs of witchcraft. "That Witches who are Midwives in Various Ways Kill the Child
Conceived in the Womb, and Procure an Abortion; or if they do not this Offer New-born Children to Devils." At
this time in history the great majority of births were attended by midwives, women familiar with childbirth and herbal
cures. In other words these women were healers. They were also the confidants of women who wanted to have
children and those who did not want children, so they had some knowledge of birth control and abortion. They were
experts in sexual matters in a society dominated by a celibate clergy that had confounded sexuality with devil
worship. Once the Malleus Maleficarum made the association of midwives with witchcraft these women could be
brought before the Inquisition for questioning. Few were found innocent. Thus begun, the witch burning craze
continued into the eighteenth century. (Young)
Below: A Basque witch applies flying salve of tropanes (Rudgley)
Up to the 15 th century, women's "charms and spells" were virtually the only repository of
practical medicine. Paracelsus said witches taught him everything he knew about healing.'
Agrippa von Nettesheim thought witches superior to male practitio- ners: "Are not
philosophers, mathematicians, and astrologers often inferior to country women in their
divinations and predictions, and does not the old nurse very often beat the doctor?" Scot
observed that a male "conjurer" was permitted to cure disease by magic arts, whereas a
woman was condemned to death for doing so.
Officially, women were often forbidden to do any kind of healing. In 1322 a woman named
Jacoba Felicle was arrested and prosecuted by the medical faculty of the University of Paris
for practicing medicine, although, the record said, "she was wiser in the art of surgery and
medicine than the greatest master or doctor in Paris." Witches were convenient scapegoats
for doctors who failed to cure their patients, for it was the "received" belief that witch-caused
illnesses were incurable.
When the church declared war on female healers, healing became a crime punishable by death if it was practiced by
a woman. Women were forbidden to study medicine, and "if a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a
witch and must die." Alison Peirsoun was so famous as a healer that the archbishop of St. Andrews sent for her
when he was sick, and she cured him. Later he had her arrested, charged with witchcraft and burned."
The Pagan Origins of Witches
Witchcraft and Women's Culture - Starhawk
The extent to which pagan religion, as such, actually survived among the witches of the 16th and 17th centuries has
been much discussed but never decided. Dean Church said, "Society was a long time unlearning heathenism; it has
not done so yet; but it had hardly begun, at any rate it was only just beginning, to imagine the possibility of such a
thing in the eleventh century." In 15th-century Bohemia it was still common practice at Christmas and other holidays
to make offerings to "the gods," rather than to God.
European villages still hid many "wise-women" who acted as priestesses officially or unofficially. Since church fathers
declared Christian priestesses unthinkable, all functions of the priestess were associated with paganism. Bishops
described pagan gatherings in their dioceses, attended by "devils ... in the form of men and women." Pagan
ceremonies were allowed to survive in weddings, folk festivals, seasonal rites, feasts of the dead, and so on.
But when women or Goddesses played the leading role in such ceremonies, there was more determined suppression.
John of Salisbury wrote that it was the devil, "with God's permission," who sent people to gatherings in honor of the
Queen of the Night, a priestess impersonating the Moon-goddess under the name of Noctiluca or Herodiade.
Martin of Braga said women must be condemned for "decorating tables, wearing laurels, taking omens from
footsteps, putting fruit and wine on the log in the hearth, and bread in the well, what are these but worship of the
devil? For women to call upon Minerva when they spin, and to observe the day of Venus at weddings and to call
upon her whenever they go out upon the public highway, what is that but worship of the devil?"
The Dominican Johann Herolt declared in the 15th century: "Most women belie their catholic faith with charms and
spells, after the fashion of Eve their first mother, who believed the devil speaking through the serpent rather than God
himself... [A] ny woman by herself knows more of such superstitions and charms than a hundred men."
Scholars aren't sure how much pagan religion survived in the form of actual group worship, at the beginning of the
era of persecution. Pico della Mirandola's La Strega (The Witch) described a cult in northern Italy where a pagan
Goddess presided over sexual orgies; she was said to bear a close resemblance to the Mother of God." Another
group at Arras was said to have centered on "a prostitute" called Demiselle, or The Maiden. Her consort was the
Abbot of Little Sense, otherwise known as the Prince of Fools, a composer and singer of popular songs-in other
words, it was a cult of minstrelsy.
Fear of Witches
Pope Innocent declared that witches could blast crops and domestic animals, cause disease, prevent husbands and
wives from copulating, and in general "outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very
many. " Churchmen took it upon themselves to carry out God's vengeance, which developed into a hideous
nightmare artificially hastening the Day of Judgement. They fostered the public delusion that witches were engaged in
a vast secret plot, under the devil's guidance, to overthrow the kingdom of God on earth. They created and
embellished the concept of the black mass, and made laymen believe it frequently occurred, whereas it was largely a
fraud supported only by spurious "evidence" from the torture chamber.
Persecutors said it was heretical to consider witches harmless. Even in England, where witches were not burned but
hanged, some authorities fearfully cited the "received opinion" that a witch's body should be burned to ashes to
prevent ill effects arising from her blood. Numerous stories depict the persecutors' fear of their victims. It was said in
the Black Forest that a witch blew in her executioner's face, promising him his reward; the next day he was afflicted
with a fatal leprosy. Inquisitors' handbooks directed them to wear at all times a bag of salt consecrated on Palm
Sunday; to avoid looking in a witch's eyes; and to cross themselves constantly in the witches' prison.
Scot said witchmongers gave the witches as much power as Christ, and even more, when they claimed witches
could raise the dead, as Christ raised Lazarus; they could turn water into other fluids, like wine or milk; they could
control the weather, the crops, animals, men; they could see into the past and future. Reading of witches' trials, he
said, you shall see such impossibilities confessed, as none, having his right wits, will believe." Churchmen, however,
viewed the impossibility of witches' miracles as perfectly good ground for believing them, "because the performance
of the impossible proved that demons were at work."
Dr. Blackstone, England's ultimate authority on jurisprudence, wrote: "To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence
of Witchcraft and Sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God in various passages both of the
Old and New Testament; and the thing itself is a truth to which every Nation in the World hath in its turn borne
testimony."
A derogatory portrait of Calvin by Giuseppe Archimboldo of Milan (Jones 225).
Although the Inquisition was Catholic on origin witch-hunts were also a protestant affair.
When skepticism about witchcraft seemed to be on the rise, John Wesley cried bitterly, "The giving up of witchcraft
is in effect the giving up of the Bible. " Calvin and Knox also protested that denial of witchcraft meant denial of the
Bible's authority.
As late as the 1920s a rector of four parishes in Norfolk could still write: "If I were to take a census of opinion in all
four villages I am certain that I should find a majority of people seriously professing belief in witchcraft, the policy of
the 'evil eye,' and the efficacy of both good and evil spells."
In the 1940s, Seabrook estimated that "half the literate white population in the world today believe in witchcraft";
and the nonliterate nonwhite population attains a much higher proportion. A Gallup poll taken in 1978 showed that
ten percent of all Americans believe in witches.
Sorcery and Witchcraft
The church distinguished between sorcery, which was generally acceptable, and witchcraft, which was heresy. Von
Nettesheim's books of sorcery were published under church auspices, accompanied by a statement of ecclesiastical
approval; indeed, his instructor in magic had been John Trithemius, an abbot. What the distinction between sorcery
and witchcraft boiled down to was that men could practice magic, women could not.
Early in the conquest the notorious dismemberment and slaughter
of Aztec musicians because they were celebrating a heathen festival (Gruzinski).
The Americas
In Central and South America, "heathen" natives were tortured and burned for crimes against the true faith, such as
not believing in it. Mayan scribes in Central America wrote: "Before the coming of the Spaniards, there was no
robbery or violence. The Spanish invasion was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, the beginning of
strife." Catholic fathers of the mission of San Francisco burned many Indian "witches" before the tribes were
sufficiently subdued to accept God's word. Missionary teams included an inquisitor.
All the aspects of witchcraft crossed over to the Americas with European colonists. In the reports that in Spanish
and French territories cases of witchcraft were under the jurisdiction of church courts, and no one suffered death on
this charge. However the church also technically remained free of blood in Europe causing civil courts to pass
sentence. In the English colonies about 40 people were executed for witchcraft between 1650 and 1710, half of
them in the famous Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
Salem: Remembered in Arthur Miller's Crucible
Aftermath and Implications of the Inquisition and Witch Trials
Witch trials declined in most parts of Europe after 1680; in England the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished in
1736. In the late 17th and 18th centuries one last wave of witch persecution afflicted Poland and other areas of
eastern Europe, but that ended by about 1740. The last legal execution of a witch occurred in Switzerland in 1782.
The Inquisition remained active until 1834.
The institution and its excesses have been an embarrassment to many modern Christians. In anti-Catholic and
antireligious polemics since the Enlightenment (for example, Voltaire's Candide), the Inquisition has been cited as a
prime example of what is thought to be the barbarism of the Middle Ages. Despite all efforts at understanding the
institution in the light of social, political, religious, and ideological factors, today the Inquisition is generally admitted to
belong to the darker side of Christian history. (Grollier)
Even in the present century, Catholic authorities have tried to present the Inquisition in an undeservedly flattering
light. Cardinal Lepicier, expressly supported by Pope Plus X, declared the church's reign of terror was right, just
because the church did it. "The naked fact that the Church, of her own authority, has tried heretics and condemned
them to be delivered to death, shows that she truly has the right of killing.... [W]ho dares to say that the Church has
erred in a matter so grave as this?"
Leland wrote: "When people believe, or make believe, in a thing so very much as to torture like devils and put to
death hundreds of thousands of fellow-beings, mostly helpless and poor old women, not to mention many children, it
becomes a matter of very serious import to all humanity to determine once for all whether the system or code
according to which this was done was absolutely right for ever, or not."
The cultural backgrounds of the past and current generation political dictators provides interesting material for
speculation. Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Hitler, Peron and almost without exception the Latin-American dictators
were or are Roman Catholics, at least in their education and upbringing. And Stalin had considerable training for the
priesthood of an equally dictatorial church. Confronted with such facts one is compelled at least to ask himself what
kind of causal sequences are here suggested... In both Islam and Christendom the naive believers have over long
periods been taught that it vas their duty to slaughter the unbeliever, or whoever refused to accept their particular
version of divine guidance.
It is unsettling to realize that such powers for mischief could yet be revived. The edicts that established the Inquisition
have never been repealed. They are "officially still part of the Catholic faith, and were used as justification for certain
practices as recently as 1969." Julian Huxley deplored the "pestilent doctrine on which all the churches have insisted,
that honest disbelief in their more or less astonishing creeds is a moral offense ... deserving and involving the same
future retribution as murder and robbery." In his opinion, the worst visions of hell would seem pale beside a
comprehensive vision of Christianity's gory history. Such history should be remembered, on the old principle that
those who cannot remember their history are condemned to repeat it. |
