Questions for the Great European Witch Hunt essay
The topics for the essay "Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt" by Jenny Gibbons were extremely hard for me to figure out. There was just too much information and all I did when I first read the essay was say, yep, really?!?, oh man I've been so wrong, yikes! etc... So here are a few discussion topics. (Only 11 questions, so don't be scared by the length!)
"..."Community-based" courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused witches. National courts condemned only about 30% of the accused. ...Witchcraft cases were usually surrounded by general fear and public protests. "Community-based" courts drew their officials from the community, the group of people affected by this panic. National courts had more distance from the hysteria. Moreover 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."1. In the Crucible, the court judges came from out of town. Yet they were not really national courts either. Why do you think the court went along with the community hysteria?
"...panics clustered around borders. France's major crazes occurred on its Spanish and eastern fronts. Italy's worst persecution was in the northern regions. Spain's one craze centered on the Basque lands straddling the French/Spanish border."2. While we don't think of America as having borders. Salem was certainly on the frontier at the time of the trials. What role do you think living on a border has in relation to witch trials?
"...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. ...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."3. It only took one Inquisitor to stop the hysteria in the Basque region of Spain. We saw one Judge try and stop the hysteria in Salem. Why do you think he failed?
"...We can isolate certain factors that increased a person's odds of being accused. Most witches were women. Many were poor or elderly; many seem to be unmarried. Most were alienated from their neighbors, or seen as "different" and disliked. But there is no evidence that one group was targeted."4. Salem executed its "different" and "disliked" immediately. Then it went on to execute many upstanding citizens. How did/do the trials get so out of control?
"...theories on who the witches were. Margaret Murray ... proposed that witches were members of a Pagan sect that worshiped the Horned God. Murray's research was exceptionally poor, and occasionally skated into out-right textual manipulation. She restricted her studies to our worst evidence: witch hunting propaganda and trials that involved copious amounts of torture. She then assumed that such evidence was basically accurate, and that the Devil was "really" a Pagan god. None of these assumptions have held up under scrutiny."5. I've been wrestling with this paragraph for � an hour. And I still don't know what to say. I think this paragraph is one of the most important ones in the essay. Here is one of my attempts:Margaret Murray is on so many pagan "recommended reading lists" that it is difficult to fight the belief that the witch hunts were fueled by the Church's desire to combat paganism. It is also difficult to fight the belief because so many of us would like it to be true. It "feels" right in some way to us. Yep, I'd love it to be true too, but it isn't. And I know it isn't. The fact is that there weren't any pagans worshipping the Horned God or the Goddess during the time of the witch trials. These are false constructs. (Read Hutton's "Triumph of the Moon" for more information) However, the overthrow of the Murray thesis doesn't mean you have to lose faith. Just because it didn't happen in history doesn't make the theories and practices less valid in the present. The worship of the Goddess and the Horned God are very real and very valid in the present, in their own right. The need to use history as a way to gain authenticity is not necessary.
"...."midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters" than as victims of their inquiries. How did witches become witch-hunters? By blaming illnesses on their rivals. ...When they [male doctors] did diagnose witchcraft, doctors almost never blamed a particular healer or witch. They were trying to explain their failure, not to destroy some individual. ...Folk healers regularly blamed illnesses on magick and offered counter-spells to cure their patients. Many were even willing to divine the name of the cursing witch, for a fee."6. This is another popular belief circulating in the pagan community. It is easier to explain away the witch trials as attacks against specific groups, than it is to understand how so many could have died because of mass hysteria. Have you ever been caught up in a "witch hunt"? How about at work? Did you chime in and agree that so and so was a you know what because of gossip? Did you know better, but still give in to the group mind?
"...One basic fact about the Great Witch Hunt stands out: most of the people accused were women. ... approximately 75% -80% of the accused were women. ... In several of the Scandinavian countries, equal numbers of men and women were accused. In Iceland over 90% of the accused were men. ... Central Europe killed the most witches, and it killed many more women than men -- this is why the overall percentages are so badly skewed."7. Why do you think women are more frequently the target than men? Why do more of them die?
"...When the first trial record studies were completed, it was obvious that early estimates were fantastically high. Trial evidence showed that witch crazes were not everyday occurrences, as literature suggested. In fact most countries only had one or two in all of the Great Hunt. ... To date, less than 15,000 definite executions have been discovered in all of Europe and America combined. ...it is now clear that death tolls higher than 100,000 are not believable. ... Brian Levack ... estimated that 60,000 witches died. ... Ronald Hutton estimated that 40,000 witches died..."8. Can I just say WOW. I had totally the wrong number in my head about how many died. Though I think any number is one too many. This is another piece of information that we need to circulate widely!
"[A]n enormous gap has opened between the academic and the "average" Pagan view of witchcraft. We continue to use of out-dated and poor writers, like Margaret Murray, Montague Summers, Gerald Gardner, and Jules Michelet. We avoid the somewhat dull academic texts that present solid research, preferring sensational writers who play to our emotions. For example, I have never seen a copy of Brian Levack's The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe in a Pagan bookstore. Yet half the stores I visit carry Anne Llewellyn Barstow's Witchcraze, a deeply flawed book which has been ignored or reviled by most scholarly historians."9. What is our responsibility as pagans/witches for historical research. What can we do to get publishers, editors and authors to use better sources or do better research? How can we get bookstores to invest in better books?
"Few Pagans commented on the haunting similarities between the Great Hunt and America's panic over Satanic cults. Scholars noticed it; we didn't. We say "Never again the Burning!" But if we don't know what happened the first time, how are we ever going to prevent it from happening again?"10. What is our responsibility now that we know more of the truth about the witch hunts.
11. Who else had their "pet theories" and "regular beliefs" uprooted by this essay? Which ones?
Last updated: May 7, 2004 
