| Political
and religious reasons brought about the
persecution of witches. The belief of inferiority
of women had exsisted before in the time of St
Paul, but a growing male medical profession
didn't want competition in the form of female
herbalists and midwives. Midwives were successful
and offered a more painless method of child
birth, it was claimed by the doctors that women
deserved the pain from the sin of Eve. There was
a high rate of infant mortality so using this to
claim that these midwives sacrificed the babies
to the devil was easily done, the grieving mother
would want this blame to ease the loss. The crime
of Witchcraft meant that their land could be
seized, so that old widows or spinsters,
unwilling to give up their land, were easy
targets of being accused of Witchcraft to gain
their holdings. It is suggested that as late as
1693 in Salem, Massachusetts, the want of others
land was behind a lot of the accusations of
practising witchcraft. High witches, who
practised more serious and dangerous magick, such
as raising demons, were usually men, such as
popes and royalty, these people however escaped
accusation as the common folk religion of the
countryside was an easy target. In December 1484
the Bull of Pope Innocent 7 was published,
appointing Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger as
inquisitors of those who practised witchcraft and
magick. They wrote Malleus Maleficarum 'Hammer of
the Witches' which describes ways of torturing
witches to confess, it states that it is better
to kill an innocent person than let a witch go
free. The book was a best seller and was used to
justify these unfair hunts in mainland Europe.
Torture to obtain confession was not allowed in
England except by royal assent. But many
inquisitors were very cruel to victims, who would
often confess in hope of having the interrogation
brought to an end. The worst period for witch
brunings and hangings was in Europe between the
mid-fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries,
where it is estimated 1/4 million people died
from penalty of witchcraft, on top of that the
fear created meant many more people were killed
by mobs looking for a scapegoat for bad harvests
or dying cattle. Matthew Hopkins who died in 1647
brought at least 236 executions of witches, he
became a witchfinder general with 4 assistants to
bring torture and terror to the eastern counties
of England especially, while gaining a large
fortunre for himself in the process. In the
American colonies the most well known trials were
those in Salem 1692 to 1693. there was mass
hysteria, 141 people from the town were arrested,
19 were hanged, even a dog was hanged. Dorcas
Good, a four year old was the youngest to be
accused, she was imprisoned, then released on
bail after her mother was hanged, but her younger
sibling died in prson while Dorcas was driven
insane from the experience. 3/4 of those killed
as witches in Europe and Scandinavia were women,
lowerclass, older. As the number of healers
shrunk infant mortality rose as male physicians
took over. Anyone different, eccentric, senile,
deformed, even old women living alone, could be
blamed for the deaths of animals, the failure of
crops and outbreaks of disease. The State and
church had legalised this and encouraged it.
Faeries became assocaited with witchcraft and so
the devil. The Bean-Tighe, a faerie housekeeper,
popular in Ireland and Scotland mythology who was
said to help wise women with their chores. If an
old women had an immaculate house it was claimed
she had been helped by faeries and so was
consorting with the devil. The last person
executed for witchcraft in England was Alice
Molland at Exeter in 1712, but it was not until
1951 that the Witchcraft Act of 1736 was repealed
and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act. |
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