After Jesus of Nazareth was born, the "Christ Cult" slowly spread all over the earth. However, it was not as widespread as people seem to think it was. (In fact, it's not as widespread now as people seem to think it is--did you know that only 20% of the earth's population is Christian?) By the middle of the sixteenth century in Europe, there were still people who passed the old ways along to their children and families that had never been Christian. However, the witchcraze that started in about 1560, often called the "Burning Times" by modern Witches, virtually ensured that hereditary Witchcraft all but died out.
The Burning Times were caused by many and varied reasons. First of all, people believed that harmful magic existed and that people could attain this power through a pact with Satan. Women were believed to be especially vulnerable to the power of the devil, because people believed women were sexually insatiable. It was crucial for this belief to be in place before the Burning Times could start. The next step in the witchcraze was personal calamity. An illness or death in the family, a natural disaster, the deaths of livestock -- all could be conveniently blamed on an undesirable or strange member of the community. Some women were brought to trial because a person who they had given bread to decades earlier had suddenly died. Personal revenge also played a factor in the cause of the Burning Times, as did land disputes. These factors started a few isolated witch hunts, and the ball was rolling.
The major factor that brought the witchcraze
from isolated incidents to a continental holocaust was the quest for political
power. People who helped "drive out evil" in a town were admired and gained
power among the people. Accusing a witch and helping convict them gave
a person such favor with the church and the government that men often accused
their own daughters, wives, and mothers as a tool to move up in society.
Most men whose wives had been accused by other parties certainly wouldn't
defend them -- this caused political and social death, and sometimes even
execution.
Witchhunting became so respected and profitable that some people made it their sole profession. Many Christian holidays had already been placed on the days of Pagan festivals, to incriminate those who didn't go to church on these days. Instructional manuals were written, including the Malleus Maleficarum, a book that is rivaled only by the Bible as a historical bestseller. Witch hunting practices were often deceitful--the Malleus Maleficarum describes how to catch a witch with a retractable poker. Witches were believed not to bleed, so showing that a woman could be pricked and not made to bleed would convince a crowd that she was a witch. The Malleus Maleficarum instructs the witchhunter to prick himself with a poker and show the crowd that it was sharp and made him bleed. Then he quickly switched this poker for a retractable one while the crowd was not looking. He poked the woman with this retractable poker and, of course, it didn't break her skin. She was all but convicted at this point.
Once on trial, the methods used to convict a witch were also deceptive. The women were most often tortured painfully until they were made to confess. (Evidence shows that women often were set free if they managed to survive the torture without confessing. However, this was something rarely accomplished.) Some women, however, confessed without being tortured. Why was this? Historians hypothesize that past sexual "immorality" had convinced some women that they actually had been corrupted by the devil, or that abusive husbands had led some women to believe that they were married to and being abused by Satan himself! Some women, of course, confessed to avoid the inevitable torture. Nonetheless, confession did not always assure leniency, and even women who were let out of prison were never truly free. The accusation of witchcraft followed them their whole lives. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, in her book Witchcraze, describes a Dutch woman named Neele Ellers whose mother was accused of witchcraft when she was 10, Neele herself was accused at 23, and Neele was finally convicted and burned at the stake (along with the rest of her family) in her sixties.
Men were also accused of witchcraft, of
course, but the majority of those accused were women. When men were accused,
it was often because a female family member had been accused, or because
the accused man was a criminal and the courts or accusers were trying to
worsen the charges against them. Barstow's research shows that about 80%
of those accused and 85% of those executed during the witchcraze were female.
The typical "witch" was female, middle aged, reclusive, single or widowed
("no man to defend or control her"), and they were often healers or midwives
-- possessing an awe - inspiring and misunderstood power that people assumed
could be used for evil just as well as good.
Executions of witches were always public, and in the form of hanging, stoning, burning at the stake, and many other bizarre and eclectic products of the community's imagination. Many witches never made it to their execution, or even to a trial -- they were killed during torture or lynched by their community. By the time the women were executed, they had already been whipped and slashed, often having hands and breasts cut completely off. Death was welcome to these victims. Estimates of the number dead in the European witchcraze by my colleagues have ranged from 3 to 10 million, but Barstow's extensive research puts the number of dead between 1560 and 1760 at about 100,000. Nevertheless, the mass murder affected society greatly. Only two female inhabitants of the village of Langendorf, Rhineland were not arrested, and in one Rhenish village, one woman out of every two families was dead.
America's version of this witchcraze seems insignificant in comparison. In the village of Salem, Massachusetts, 20 people were executed for the crime of witchcraft -- 19 women hanged and one man pressed to death under heavy stones. Though it may seem insignificant, this event of 1693 left a deep scar on the American consciousness. The mental plague that took over this Puritan town was much more vile that it looks at first glance. When town officials explored the event several years after the bodies were decaying in their graves, they found strong evidence that the accusers had had a decades long land dispute with the accused. Since the accused would not sell, the accusers tried a different avenue: the death of all these landowners would cause their land to go on the market. The Salem trials are perfect proof of how people turned to an easy method of murder to accomplish their financial and political goals.
Am I suggesting that all of these women and men were actually Witches? No, actually, I'd be rather surprised if any of them actually were. The executions and accusations had nothing to do with actual Witchcraft or Pagan spirituality. However, the Burning Times are an important part of neo-Pagan history because of the great and almost fatal damage they caused to European Pagan religions as a whole.
A book about the European witchcraze that
is highly recommend is Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch
Hunts, by Anne Llewellyn Barstow. Besides giving a concise and interesting
history of the Burning Times, Barstow asks a question that h as simply
never been asked before: "Why were most of the victims women?" You may
think it's an unnecessary question to ask, but try to tell yourself where
the idea that witches are women came from. If you'd like to know more about
the Salem Witch Trials, I recommend that you watch the movie Three Sovereigns
for Sarah.
~*~NEVER
AGAIN
THE
BURNING
TIMES~*~
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