VII.
PROTESTANT WITCH HUNTS
1.
Overview
A.
Preserved Smith
Witch
hunts were widespread from the 16th century up to the 18th. Smith,
the secularist historian, feels that:
"A
. . . patent cause of the mania was the zeal and bibliolatry of
Protestantism . . . Luther . . . seeing an idiotic child, whom he
regarded as a changeling, . . . recommended the authorities to drown
it, as a body without a soul. Repeatedly, both in private talk and in
public sermons, he recommended that witches should be put to death
without mercy and without regard for legal niceties . . . Four
witches were burned at Wittenberg on June 29, 1540. The other
Protestants hastened to follow the bad example of their master. In
Geneva, under Calvin, 34 women were burned or quartered for the crime
in the year 1545. A sermon of Bishop Jewel in 1562 was perhaps the
occasion of a new English law against witchcraft . . . After the
mania reached its height in the closing years of the century,
anything, however trivial, would arouse suspicion . . . The Spanish
Inquisition, on the other hand . . . treated witchcraft as a
diabolical delusion." (115:186-7)
B.
John Stoddard
"Protestants
in the town of Salem hanged numbers of persons accused of being
witches, and in the neighbouring town of Charlestown a poor old
clergyman was, for the same reason, crushed to death between two
slabs of stone! This cruel deed was even publicly commended by the
Protestant ministers of Boston and Charlestown. John Wesley . . . was
one of the bitterest persecutors of 'witchcraft,' and declared - 'The
giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible.' In England
under James I, a law was passed subjecting witches to death on the
first conviction, even though they had done no harm. Twelve Anglican
Bishops voted for this law! The last witch was hanged in Scotland in
1727, but in 1773 the Associated Presbytery reaffirmed its belief in
witchcraft." (92:208)
2.
Luther
"I
would have no compassion on these witches; I would burn them all."
(92:99)
3.
England
"The
laws of Henry VIII (1541) punished with death any of several
practices ascribed to witches, but the Spanish Inquisition branded
stories of witchcraft as the delusions of weak minds, and cautioned
its agents (1538) to ignore the popular demand for the burning of
witches." (122:851-2)
"In
England, under Elizabeth, before the craze had more than well started
on its career, . . . 47 are known to have been executed for the
crime." (115:188)
The
brilliant historian Paul Johnson contends that; "Above all,
Puritanism was the dynamic behind the increase in witch-hunting."
(63)
4.
Scotland
Philip
Hughes informs us that:
"In
Scotland, 1560-1600 (then Calvinist), some 8,000 women were burnt as
witches - the total population was around 600,000." (45:273)
This
is actually, incredibly, 1.3% of the population! Projecting these
rates to the United States, which had a population of 231 million in
1980, 3.07 million witches would have been executed from 1940 to
1980, or roughly the whole population of Chicago!
5.
Bullinger
"Let
those men consider what they are doing, who . . . decide that witches
who deal only in dreams and hallucinations should not be burnt or put
to death." (111;v.16:364)
6.
Calvin's Geneva
"Like
later Puritan governments, that of Geneva displayed an increased
ferocity towards witches, of whom on the average two or three were
burned every year." (121:164)
7.
Conclusion (Karl Keating)
"In
Britain 30,000 went to the stake for witchcraft; in Protestant
Germany the figure was 100,000 . . . If the Inquisition establishes
the falsity of Catholicism, the witch trials establish the falsity of
Protestantism." (4:292,298)
Meanwhile, witch-hunters' manuals multiplied, most notably the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), published in 1486. Its authors, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, were experienced Dominican inquisitors who had burned 48 witches in one diocese alone and had obtained a papal bull approving their mission. Reversing the old principle of the Canon Episcopi, Sprenger and Kraemer proclaimed that not believing in the reality of witches was heresy. Witches regularly did physical as well as spiritual harm to others, they wrote, and allegiance to the devil defined witchcraft. Sprenger and Kraemer exhorted secular authorities to fight witches by any means necessary.
What about a real witch writing about this topic?
Since
the late 1970's, a quiet revolution has taken place in the study of
historical witchcraft and the Great European Witch Hunt. ... many
theories which reigned supreme thirty years ago have vanished, swept
away by a flood of new data. the quantity and quality of available
evidence has dramatically improved...Today, for the first time, we
have a good idea of the dimensions of the Great Hunt: where the
trials occurred, who was tried in them, who did the killing, and how
many people lost their lives. Every aspect of the Great Hunt, from
chronology to death toll, has changed. And if your knowledge of the
"Burning Times" is based on popular or Pagan literature,
nearly everything you know may be wrong.
For
years, the responsibility for the Great Hunt has been dumped on the
Catholic Church's door-step. 19th century historians ascribed the
persecution to religious hysteria. And when Margaret Murray proposed
that witches were members of a Pagan sect, popular writers trumpeted
that the Great Hunt was not a mere panic, but rather a deliberate
attempt to exterminate Christianity's rival religion. Today, we know
that there is absolutely no evidence to support this theory.
When
the Church was at the height of its power (11th-14th centuries) very
few witches died. Persecutions did not reach epidemic levels until
after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position
as Europe's indisputable moral authority. Moreover most of the
killing was done by secular courts. Church courts tried many witches
but they usually imposed non-lethal penalties. A witch might be
excommunicated, given penance, or imprisoned, but she was rarely
killed. The Inquisition almost invariably pardoned any witch who
confessed and repented.
...
in York, England, as described by Keith Thomas (Religion and the
Decline of Magic). At the height of the Great Hunt (1567-1640) one
half of all witchcraft cases brought before church courts were
dismissed for lack of evidence. No torture was used, and the accused
could clear himself by providing four to eight "compurgators",
people who were willing to swear that he wasn't a witch. Only 21% of
the cases ended with convictions, and the Church did not impose any
kind of corporal or capital punishment.
...
Ironically, the worst courts were local courts. ..."Community-based"
courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused
witches... national courts tended to have professional, trained staff
-- men who were less likely to discard important legal safeguards in
their haste to see "justice" done.
But
what of the Inquisition? For many, the "Inquisition" and
the "Burning Times" are virtually synonymous. The myth of
the witch-hunting inquisition was built on several assumptions and
mistakes, all of which have been overturned in the last twenty-five
years.
...a
common translation error ... said that a witch was tried "by
inquisition"..Later, when historians examined the records in
greater detail, they found that the majority did not involve the
Inquisition, merely an inquisition ...older and more popular texts
(such as Rossell Hope Robbins' Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and
Demonology) still have the Inquisition killing witches in times and
places where it did not even exist.
...In
the 1970's, when feminist and Neo-Pagan authors turned their
attention to the witch trials, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of
Witches) was the only manual readily available in translation.
Authors naively assumed that the book painted an accurate picture of
how the Inquisition tried witches. Heinrich Kramer, the text's
demented author, was held up as a typical inquisitor. His rather
stunning sexual preoccupations were presented as the Church's
"official" position on witchcraft. Actually the Inquisition
immediately rejected the legal procedures Kramer recommended and
censured the inquisitor himself just a few years after the Malleus
was published. Secular courts, not inquisitorial ones, resorted to
the Malleus.
...Lamothe-Langon's
[who's notoriously forged] trials were the last great piece of
"evidence", and when they fell, scholars re-examined the
Inquisition's role in the Burning Times. What they found was quite
startling. In
1258 Pope Alexander IV explicitly refused to allow the Inquisition
from investigating charges of witchcraft: "The
Inquisitors, deputed to investigate heresy, must not intrude into
investigations of divination or sorcery without knowledge of manifest
heresy involved." The gloss on this passage explained what
"manifest heresy" meant: "praying at the altars of
idols, to offer sacrifices, to consult demons, to elicit responses
from them... or if [the witches] associate themselves publicly with
heretics." In other words, in the 13th century the Church did
not consider witches heretics or members of a rival religion.
It
wasn't until 1326, almost 100 years later, that the Church reversed
its position and allowed the Inquisition to investigate witchcraft.
But the only significant contribution that was made was in the
development of "demonology", the theory of the diabolic
origin of witchcraft. As John Tedeschi demonstrates in his essay
"Inquisitorial Law and the Witch" (in Bengt Ankarloo and
Gustav Henningsen's Early Modern European Witchcraft) the Inquisition
still played a very small role in the persecution. From 1326-1500,
few deaths occurred. Richard Kieckhefer (European Witch Trials) found
702 definite executions in all of Europe from 1300-1500; of these,
only 137 came from inquisitorial or church courts. By the time that
trials were common (early 16th century) the Inquisition focused on
the proto-Protestants. When the trials peaked in the 16th and 17th
century, the Inquisition was only operating in two countries: Spain
and Italy, and both had extremely low death tolls.
In
fact, in Spain the Inquisition worked diligently to keep witch trials
to a minimum. Around 1609, a French witch-craze triggered a panic in
the Basque regions of Spain. Gustav Henningsen (The Witches'
Advocate) documented the Inquisition's work in brilliant detail.
Although several inquisitors believed the charges, one skeptic
convinced La Suprema (the ruling body of the Spanish Inquisition)
that this was groundless hysteria. La Suprema responded by issuing an
"Edict of Silence" forbidding all discussion of witchcraft.
For, as the skeptical inquisitor noted, "There were neither
witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about."
...The
Witches Court records showed that there was no such thing as an
"average" witch: there was no characteristic that the
majority of witches shared, in all times and places. Not gender. Not
wealth. Not religion. Nothing. The only thing that united them was
the fact that they were accused of witchcraft. The diversity of
witches is one of the strongest arguments against the theory that the
Great Hunt was a deliberate pogrom aimed at a specific group of
people. If that was true, then most witches would have something in
common.
Jenny
is a wiccan historian writing for the Covenant of the Goddess
website. I quote Jenny because of her wiccan background. If any web
site would be against Catholicism this site would be but she had the
integrity to report the results of her research. I also have found
similar information from secular and religious historians...