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"From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!"
So runs a traditional prayer. This time
of year, though, we swing the door open wide. We wear costumes, watch movies,
and visit haunted houses populated by nightmares we normally shove under the
bed. The queen of our revels is the witch. A long-nosed old woman in a conical
hat, riding on a broom and accompanied by a black cat, the witch is a staple
from Walmart displays to documentary films.
We all know her story. During the Middle
Ages, the misogynist Catholic Church burned nine million women because they
were practitioners of a peaceful, universal, goddess-worshipping religion that
had existed since the Stone Age. The woman-hating Judeo-Christian tradition and
bloodthirsty Western Civilization drove this Pagan religion underground. With
the coming of the Enlightenment and the primacy of science over faith, the
witch hunt stopped.
The National Film Board of Canada
documentary "The Burning Times" recounts this
history. Dan Brown tells this very tale in "The DaVinci Code." You
can read it on page 105 here. Neo-Pagans cling to this narrative
because it provides a patina of ancient authenticity to their beliefs. Atheists
recite it because it proves that religious people are violent, dangerous
lunatics, and that it is only by rejecting religion that man can be moral. Some
Protestants support it because it makes the Catholic Church look bad. Nowadays,
our Woke superiors are grateful for the timeworn witch narrative. The Woke hope
to replace Western Civilization with their Utopia. Europe's persecution of
witches is just one of a litany of Western crimes, including the Inquisition
and the Crusades, that prove how irredeemable the wicked West is.
Here's a fact that's even spookier than
ghoulies and ghosties. Not a single element of the above-told witch narrative
is true. Even scarier: because humanity hasn't faced up to the witch craze, we
haven't learned the necessary harsh lessons, and we are all too likely to
repeat the witch craze's demented destruction. In fact we may be all too close
to that reenactment right now.
The fake witch narrative begins "during
the Middle Ages." The witch craze did not occur in the Middle Ages, that
is, between 500-1500. It occurred in the Early Modern Period, c 1500-1700. Thus
we associate witches with the conical hats that were fashionable in the
seventeenth century; see the 1675 "Portrait of Mrs. Salesbury," here. The Catholic Church existed for over
a thousand years without a witch craze. Before 1400, it was rare for anyone to
be persecuted for witchcraft, and, in fact, church documents from the Middle
Ages deny even the existence of witches.
The insistence that the "Middle
Ages" were really the "Dark Ages," that is, a time of torture
and backwardness, is a finely honed, anti-Catholic and anti-Christian
propaganda tool. The Greco-Roman, Mediterranean world was Pagan until the reign
of Constantine, a fourth century emperor. Slowly, the classical world
Christianized. The Catholic Church became a formidable force in Western Europe.
If you want to bash Christianity, you present the Pagan, Classical world as an advanced
era of "light," and the Christianizing world that followed it as
"dark." If you want to bash the Catholic Church specifically, you
bash the era when Catholicism was dominant, before the sixteenth-century Protestant
Reformation.
The term "Dark Ages" is a
misnomer, invented to serve polemics, not accuracy. During the so-called
"Dark Ages," significant advances were made in the arts, mass
literacy, and agriculture (see here, here, here, here, and here). "Light" Pagan Rome produced
horrors like crucifixion and the sadistic nightmare spectacle of damnatio ad bestias. Christians opposed crucifixion,
gladiatorial games, and female infanticide.
There's another reason that the fake
witch narrative places the witch craze in the Middle Ages. That reason, too,
serves a false narrative, the narrative of inevitable human progress. A
conviction that people just get better, smarter, and more ethical as time goes
on is often associated with the Enlightenment, and also with many atheist
thinkers like Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer. In the worldview of human
progress, today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better than today,
and we don't need religion to be moral because as time passes, people learn
more and they inevitably become nicer. The witch craze took place during the
Middle Ages because the Middle Ages were a long time ago, and people were
stupider and more primitive then. That witches burned during the Enlightenment
defies the false narrative of inevitable human progress.
The "nine million" statistic
was invented by Gottfried Christian Voigt, an Enlightenment-era scholar. Just
as some compared the Pagan Greco-Roman world, a world of "light," to
Christianity, which brought "Dark Ages," many Christophobes insist
that the Enlightenment – note the name – was an era of "light" after
centuries of Catholic "Dark Ages."
Voigt lived under the Prussian king Frederick
the Great. Frederick was a skeptical Protestant. He conspired with Russia and
Austria to colonize Poland, a Catholic country, and there Frederick enacted
anti-Catholic policies and oppressions. Frederick corresponded with Voltaire,
the poster boy for the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment advertised itself as
being all about human liberty and equality. Just as today, back during the
Enlightenment, elites shouting about freedom and dignity were often hypocrites.
Voltaire was quite happy to support German and Russian monarchs crushing Polish
people, that is, peasants and religious Catholics and Jews. Frederick the Great
wrote to Voltaire that his oppression of Catholic Poles was merely meant to
apply Western discipline to "drunken," "shameless,"
"crude, stupid, and without instruction" Poles, "all that multitude
of imbeciles whose names terminate in ski." Voltaire responded, "It
is pleasant to destroy the people and to sing of them."
As historian Wolfgang Behringer points out,
it benefitted Voigt, living under Frederick, to diss Catholics. In an essay,
Voigt referred to "witch trials and torture" of the Catholic past,
contrasted with "the progress of science." "Our times deserve to
be rightly called enlightened," Voigt insisted. We Enlightened folk face
"a real danger of falling back into the previous barbarism and ignorance
and of losing the glory of the Enlightenment if we are not on our guard."
As Voigt rants against past
"barbarism" he is living in a state, Enlightenment-era Prussia, that
is carrying out barbarism against Poles. Voigt insists that there were 9,442,994
victims of witch trials. Voigt got to this number by assuming that all of
Catholic Europe killed witches at the same rate as Reformation-Era Germany. In
fact, Reformation-era Germany was the top murderer of witches. No other European
country, during no other era, killed as many witches as Germany during the
advance of Protestantism.
The nine million number, historian
Behringer continues, became useful many times again in German history. The Kulturkampf
took place between 1872-1878. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a
devout Protestant, conducted an anti-Catholic campaign or "culture struggle."
Again, Germans were oppressing Poles, and Poles were largely Catholic. Of
Poles, Bismarck famously said, "Hit the Poles so hard that they despair of
their life … if we want to survive, we can only exterminate them." Depicting
the witch craze as a purely Catholic phenomenon that murdered over nine million
women was a useful Kulturkampf propaganda tool.
Top Nazi Heinrich Himmler was obsessed
with manufacturing a Nazi-friendly history of the witch trials. In 1935, he
began the Hexenkartothek. This project's goal was to discredit the
Catholic Church, and prove that the witch craze was a manifestation of Catholic
hatred for German women. The witches, Himmler believed, were survivals of an
authentic, indigenous German Paganism. Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg mentioned
the witch trials repeatedly in his classic Nazi text, "The Myth of the
Twentieth Century." Again, the dark Catholicism / light replacement trope
came into play. Rosenberg described a "dark" era dominated by
Catholicism and the bright, new Utopia that Nazism would bring about, with its
"Nordic Apollonian light principle" contrasted with the "dark
tide" of "Roman racial chaos." "The witch mania of the
inquisitorial middle ages" – note that Rosenberg misplaces the witch craze
in the Middle Ages and blames it on the Inquisition – "vanishes … after
the successful Enlightenment."
Decades after the fall of the Third
Reich, some modern feminists grabbed at the nine million number because it is
larger than six million, the number of Jews murdered by Nazis. In the suffering
Olympics, women beat Jews. Inevitably, some have claimed eleven or thirteen or
eighteen million victims. Dan Brown, in "The DaVinci Code," claims
"five million." The term "Women's Holocaust" is used. As
Behringer puts it, in this manipulation of statistics, feminism and Nazi Neo-Paganism
"shake hands."
Historians using actual trial records estimate
that between 40 and 60 thousand victims were killed during the witch craze. Any
death of an alleged "witch" is horrific. One can't help but compare
this number of deaths, over the course of 200 years and the entire continent of
Europe, with the death toll of the French Revolution, one of the most notable
Enlightenment projects. The French living in the Vendee resisted the
Revolution. One estimate of the death toll there is 200,000. Of these killings,
Francois Furet wrote of "massacre and
destruction on an unprecedented scale … also a zeal so violent that it has
bestowed as its legacy much of the region's identity ... The war aptly
epitomizes the depth of the conflict ... between religious tradition and the
revolutionary foundation of democracy." The Reign of Terror resulted in
tens of thousand of deaths, some by guillotine; some from imprisonment. In a
few short years, the Enlightenment, which depicted itself as superior to the "dark,
religious" past, far outstripped the death toll of the witch craze.
The fake witch narrative is comparable
to a couple of other historical events that are popularly misunderstood – the
Inquisition and the Crusades. Both of these events were purposely
misrepresented by Protestants in an attempt to smear their rival, the Catholic
Church. This misrepresentation was not just about theological rivalries, but
real world politics. Catholic Spain and Protestant England competed for
domination of the seas and of the New World. The Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604)
included Spanish attempts to invade England, the defeat of the Spanish Armada,
and Spain ultimately declaring bankruptcy. Truth is the first casualty of war,
and Protestant England's propaganda against Catholic Spain survives in popular
culture to this day.
One legacy of that propaganda is an
exaggerated depiction of the Spanish Inquisition. Spain was "the first
victim of a long tradition of polemic that picked on the Inquisition as the
most salient point of attack," wrote Henry Kamen, author of the Yale
University Press book, "The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical
Revision." Richard L. Kagan, a Johns Hopkins professor
of Iberian and Latin American Studies, wrote in the New York Times that
"an all-powerful, torture-mad Inquisition is largely a myth. In its place
[Kamen] portrays a poor, understaffed institution whose scattered tribunals had
only a limited reach and whose methods were more humane than those of most
secular courts."
The Crusades, too, were adopted by
Protestant and Enlightenment polemicists in their attacks on Catholicism. More
recent history has presented a more nuanced view. See, for example, here, here, here, and here.
Goddess theorists like Riane Eisler,
Donna Read, Starhawk, Maria Gimbutas, Margot Adler, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Margaret
Murray, and Dan Brown tell a story that many women love. In humanity's Stone
Age past, women were revered and humans lived in peace. It's only after the
arrival of allegedly misogynist Judaism that men began to dominate and mistreat
women.
Facts on the ground present a different
story. Sites like the 10,000 year old Lake Turkana massacre in Kenya, the Crow
Creek massacre in pre-Columbian South Dakota, and defensive fortifications
around Solnitsata, a Stone Age settlement in modern-day
Bulgaria, suggest that there was never a time when humans weren't killing each
other. That ancient peoples contributed to the extinction of megafauna and
expanded desertification proves that humans have
never lived in harmony with nature. Modern Stone Age tribes, like the Yanomami,
often practice female infanticide, child marriage, polygyny,
wife beating, wife branding, and gang rape.
That shopper in the New Age store who
wears flowing robes, who smells like patchouli and listens to wind chimes is
not practicing an ancient faith. Neo-Paganism is a modern invention, cooked up
by nineteenth-century Romantic nationalists, eccentric Victorian and Edwardian
elites, top Nazis, and white supremacists. Neo-Pagans reject many
of the pillars of authentic Paganism, like animal and human sacrifice, sexism,
and stratified hierarchies. Neo-Pagans have decided that their Paganism is a
religion of environmentalism, fat acceptance, and eclecticism,
that is, picking and choosing your own Pagan observance. None of these features
of Neo-Paganism bear any relation to authentic Paganism. In short, the women
killed in the witch craze were not surviving members of a goddess-worshipping
religion that stretched back to the Stone Age and is practiced in modern
suburbs.
In
a 2007 lecture, UCLA Professor Teofilo Ruiz, who was awarded a
National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama, titillates his audience with a
tidbit about the witch-craze. In 1486, a Dominican clergyman, Heinrich Kramer,
published "The Malleus Maleficarum," or "The Hammer of Witches."
This book became a bestseller and it was used to persecute accused witches. Among
other cruel absurdities, Kramer accuses witches of stealing penises, housing
them in bird's nests, and feeding them oatmeal. One victim attempted to
retrieve his penis. He found many, and chose the biggest. The witch told him
not to take the big one, because it belonged to a priest. Kramer believed bawdy
jokes to be accurate accounts.
In referring to this passage, Prof. Ruiz
milks his audience's laughter. But Ruiz acquits his duty to deliver the heavy
verdict. "Hatred of women," he tells his audience, "is inherent
in Western Civilization." "In the two great rivers that make Western
Civilization, the Judeo-Christian tradition, women are placed in an inferior
role." Guilty of the murder of millions of innocent women, both Western
Civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition deserve capital punishment. In
his formulation of how the witch craze came about, Ruiz has plenty of company. Mount Holyoke College claims on its website
that "The Malleus Maleficarum" is "based on the Biblical … book
of Exodus."
All too few inquiring minds seek any
further than these conclusions, delivered as if definitive from authoritative
sources. Intellectually curious and ethical people, though, must ask the
following questions.
How to explain these statements?
"Let nobody presume to kill a … female servant as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be
believed by Christian minds." Anyone who does accuse another of witchcraft
must pay a fine. Or this: claims of witchcraft are "lies
in every way," and those who believe them are "stupid and
foolish," "deluded in sleep," experiencing "visions,"
and "worse than a Pagan." Or this: "Witches do not exist." Are
these statements declaring that witches do not exist and forbidding the killing
of witches the product of the modern, secular, scientific era? No. In fact they
are statements made by devout Catholics living in 643 AD, c. 900 AD, and 1100
AD. Throughout the so-called "Dark Ages" powerful Catholics insisted
that witchcraft is a delusion. What changed?
Also, if "Malleus Maleficarum"
is, as Mount Holyoke College claims, "based on the Biblical … book of
Exodus," how is it that Jews never produced a witch craze? According to
professor and Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis, "in the entire
vast rabbinic corpus" there is only one account of capital punishment used
against a witch, "and given its particularly legendary features, many
scholars have held the historicity of the story suspect." Further, "there
is no record of any large-scale witch hunts among the Jews of Europe to mirror
the witch-hunting mania that seized gentile society."
And if the Bible automatically turns men
into witch-hunting misogynists, how is it that some of Kramer's Catholic contemporaries
saw through him? Bishop Georg Golser denounced Kramer as "completely
childish." Bishop Golser "in language unusually blunt for
correspondence among ecclesiastics," ordered Kramer out of his diocese. About
Kramer, Golser wrote to a fellow priest," if [Kramer] does not withdraw
with all speed, you, father, should say to him in my place that more than
enough scandals have arisen … and that he should not remain in this place, lest
anything worse should follow from this or happen to him." Kramer "was
not someone who was so well respected by his peers that his views on witchcraft
would be accepted without question. Quite the contrary, he was widely (and
perhaps even charitably) regarded as being somewhat eccentric," writes
historian Hans Peter Broedel. Kramer "forged a document" and misused a papal
bull to grant an official sanction to "Malleus Maleficarum" that it
did not receive.
Not just Catholic individuals, but
entire Christian territories resisted the witch craze. A quick glance at a map of witch trials and witch executions might
inspire an inquisitive mind to question the fake narrative. While Germany was
sinking into murderous madness, neighboring Poland, a devoutly Catholic
country, had few witch trials. Catholic Ireland is a short distance from
Scotland and in Ireland "witch-hunting had never
really begun." Scottish witch-hunting was "twelve times more
intense" than witch hunting in England. Spain, Portugal, Austria, and
Italy, majority Catholic countries, had few trials and few executions. Orthodox
Christian countries like Russia also had few. If the witch craze really was all
about Western and Judeo-Christian misogyny, how to explain Iceland? The accused
there were almost all men. In Estonia and Russia, as
well, and in late trials, like the "Sorcerer Jack" trial in Salzburg,
most of the accused were men and boys.
Brian P. Levack, the John E. Green
Regents Professor in History at UT Austin, is one of the most important
scholars crafting an accurate history of the witch craze. Levack points out
that the witch craze was multi-causal. No one thing sparked the witch craze.
Rather, causes were psychological, sociological, theological, economic, and
political. If Ruiz were as good a scholar as he is a comedian, he'd do a bit
more thinking, and less winking and smirking, about those stolen penises, and
he'd understand the witch craze much better.
The Middle Ages was an exceptionally
warm period in the North Atlantic Region. Only the twentieth and twenty-first
century have seen higher temperatures. Suddenly, things changed. Atlantic pack
ice and mountain glaciers advanced. Swiss villages were wiped out. Summers were
no longer reliable. Rains ruined crops. The River Thames and the Baltic Sea
froze. Swedes could march across ice to Denmark. Iceland's population fell by
half. Maybe it was the sun's radiation. Maybe it was volcanic activity. Maybe
we can blame ocean currents, the earth's tilt, or even high death rates from
the Black Death. The Little Ice Age began. To us this is merely the topic of a
fascinating, if nerdy, science documentary. To Europeans in the Early Modern
Period, this Little Ice Age meant failed crops, empty bellies, starving
children, and dry cows.
In the chapter, "The
Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation," in his classic
multi-volume work on magic, "The Golden Bough," Sir James Frazer
describes traditional people having sex, or simulating sex, in cultivated
fields. "The husbandman and his wife visit their fields by night and there
engage in sexual intercourse for the purpose of promoting the growth of the
crop … young married people lie down on
the sown fields and roll several times over on them, in the belief that this
will promote the growth of the crops," he reports. It is, he says,
"the same theoretical belief in the sympathetic influence of the sexes on
vegetation" that "has led some peoples to indulge their passions as a
means of fertilising the earth." Frazer mentions "sympathetic
magic." This is the belief that like influences like. If you want a
fertile field, have sex on it. Another example: jaundice sufferers should make
eye contact with a stone curlew, a bird with yellow eyes. Lungwort, a plant
whose leaves look like lungs, is used to treat diseases of the lungs.
To Prof. Ruiz and his audience, penises
are about pleasure. To traditional people living on the knife edge of
existence, penises and vaginas are symbols of life itself. Without fertility,
humans starve. Witches steal penises; witches ride on broomsticks. Brooms, of
course, are symbols of feminine domestic labor. They are also phallic. Witches
sabotage fertility in a hungry world.
The witch craze disproportionately targeted
old women. In "Religion and the Decline of Magic," Keith Thomas describes the prototypical witch. A poor,
old woman knocks at a door and begs for a cup of milk. The householders
decline. Later, the family cow goes dry. Those who refused beer can no longer
brew beer. A girl threw stones at an old woman; afterward the girl began to
defecate stones; normal bowel movements returned only after the witch was
killed.
Folklorist Alan Dundes argues that
traditional people associate the life force with liquids like breast milk,
blood, and semen. Old women no longer produce breast milk, menstrual blood,
and, in traditional European society, a single old woman would no longer cause
men to ejaculate. By the Pagan logic of sympathetic magic, the very presence of
old women is a threat to village fertility.
Contrary to Mount Holyoke's absurd
comment, none of this is found in Exodus, nor is it Biblical. The Bible
repeatedly adjures believers specifically to take care of widows, and threatens God's
vengeance on those who mistreat them. "You shall not mistreat any widow or
fatherless child. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will
surely hear their cry," warns Exodus. The Canon Episcopi, from the early
tenth century, in line with Biblical teaching, insists that belief that witches
can work magic on victims is a Pagan belief. "'All things are made by him,
and without him nothing is made,'" it reads, quoting the Bible.
"Whoever, then, believes anything can be made, or any creature can be
changed to better or worse, or transformed into another species or resemblance
- except by the Creator himself who made all things, and through whom all
things are made - is an unbeliever beyond doubt and worse than a Pagan."
Some scholars advance a purely economic,
Darwinian motive for the focus on old women. Males and the young are more
productive economically. Whereas Christian ethics helped end female infanticide
in the Classical world, Christians, hungry and scared during the Little Ice
Age, selected older women for death because they were less productive
economically.
Emily Oster, in "Witchcraft,
Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe," graphs trials and
temperatures between 1520 and 1770. As temperatures go down, witch trials
increase. In "Witch Trials: Discontent in Early Modern Europe," Chris
Hudson relates witch trials to temperature, income, and business cycles. Dylan
Grice and Marc Carlson relate witch trials to inflation.
We've already seen that not every
country in Europe succumbed equally to the witch craze, with Germany leading
the way in trials and number of deaths. Surely the Little Ice Age affected
England and Ireland equally as Scotland, Poland as well as Germany. Why, then,
the vast differential in number of victims between England and Scotland, and
between Germany and Poland?
On October 31, 1517, a Catholic priest,
Martin Luther, nailed 95 theses to a church in Wittenberg. This date is widely
regarded as the start of the Reformation. An unintended consequence of the good
intention of reform was roughly two hundred years of war. The Catholic Church
had been close to a monopoly in Western Europe for a millennium. There was
property, law, custom, and power to be struggled over. These wars of religion
were devastating, with sickeningly large death tolls. Brothers fighting against
brothers produce spectacular atrocities. Countries like Poland, where the
Reformation had a lesser impact, were less affected by the social chaos and
horror of these fratricidal wars. Germany, ground zero for the Reformation, was
strongly affected, and it produced the most witch trials.
More than just the horrors of war
accompanied the Reformation. Catholicism is famously a "smells, bells, and
spells" religion. Catholicism is sensuous. One smells Catholicism in
incense; touches Catholicism in holy water, rosary beads, hair shirts,
scapulars, and holy oil; hears Catholicism in Latin, a language reserved for
ritual, and bells at six ringing for the Angelus; tastes Catholicism in the
Eucharist and fish on Friday; sees Catholicism in vestments, altar fixtures,
stained glass windows. The Catholic Church's official position has never been
that these sensuous features are magic, but people experienced them that way.
The water daubed on newborns and oil on the dying were experienced by many as
magical amulets protecting the devout from demonic forces.
Protestants insisted on "sola
scriptura." All you need is the Bible. The sensuous trappings of
Catholicism were condemned. Protestants embarked on an aggressive spate of
iconoclasm. Stained glass windows were smashed. Statues were burned. Protestants
are correct; Jesus never said that you need a certain type of clothing or a
certain type of bell to enter into Heaven. But the abrupt ripping away of what
felt, to many, like a security net holding believers away from demonic forces
left Christians feeling insecure and more vulnerable to Satanic attack.
Comparing a map of the Protestant Reformation at its peak, and a
map of witch trials, one sees a great deal of overlap. Places where the Protestant
Reformation had little impact also tend to be places where the witch craze had
little impact. The Catholic Church needed reform and the Reformation brought
many gifts. The problem is one of unintended consequences.
The fake witch narrative tells us that
in the Middle Ages the misogynist Catholic Church burned women. In fact the
Middle Ages produced some remarkable women who wielded real power: Catherine of
Siena, Christine de Pizan, Empress Theodora, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegard
von Bingen, and Hrotsvitha, to name a few. And, for the most part, it wasn't
the Catholic Church doing the burning. It was secular governments. Brian A.
Pavlac, professor and priest, writes, "many secular governments
hunted witches for essentially non-religious reasons … None of these
persecutions could have been carried out without the permission and cooperation
of secular governments." That it was secular governments burning witches
does not exculpate the Church, Pavlac adds. "Secular princes often hunted
witches on the advice of the clergy."
The work of Oxford historian Lyndal Roper shows
that contrary to the fake witch narrative depicting Catholic priests
armed with torches, "the real villains were the neighbors." "Witch
hunts were a collaboration between lower-level authorities and commonfolk
succumbing to garden-variety pettiness, vindictiveness, superstition and
hysteria … a pattern that recurs over and over again in various forms
throughout human history, whether or not an evil international church or a
ruthless patriarchy is involved," writes reviewer Laura Miller. The witch
craze was not about one, overarching authority forcing common people to do bad
things. The witch craze was about the erosion of authority in the chaos of the
Reformation. Roper writes, "The very fragmentation
of political and legal authority in Germany made it possible for panics to get
out of hand."
Roper describes cases where local clergy
tried to dissuade secular authorities from conducting a witch hunt, to no
avail. Think of Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery," where every citizen in
an entire village insists that they must murder one of their innocent
neighbors. During the witch craze, women turned against each other. Young,
married mothers accused solitary, old women. Young, fertile women believed that
old women envied them, and that that envy harmed them. This is the evil eye, a
belief found in a variety of cultures worldwide. It's not Christian, and it's
certainly not Biblical. Perhaps two thirds of "witchcraft quarrels began
between women." In one study, "women took action against other
women" in 61% of cases. "On a village level, witchcraft seems to have
been something peculiarly enmeshed in women's quarrels." "To a
considerable extent, village-level witch-hunting was women's work," write scholars James Sharpe and Deborah
Willis.
Oxford scholar Diane Perkiss mercilessly skewers the fake witch
narrative in the opening pages of her book, "The Witch in History: Early
Modern and Late Twentieth Century Representations." Perkiss dismisses the
claim of Barbara Ehrenreich and Teofilo Ruiz, who theorized that midwives were
the primary victims of the witch craze, because midwives were feminists who
used Pagan Goddess lore to help women acquire birth control and abortions. In
fact, Perkiss points out, puncturing this fantasy, "midwives were more
likely to be found helping witch hunters."
Tellers of the fake witch narrative want
you to believe things that aren't true, and they don't want you to be aware of
significant truths. They don't want you to know about Friedrich Spee, a German
Jesuit priest. Spee was present at the Wurzburg witch trials, one of the
deadliest outbreaks. Spee published Cautio Criminalis in 1631. The book
offers a passionate argument against the use of torture in legal proceedings.
Spee had accompanied accused witches to their deaths. He was convinced, he
wrote, of their innocence, and that any "evidence" against them was
merely a "fable" or the outcome of torture. People will say anything
under torture, he insisted. Cautio Criminalis helped bring witch trials
to an end. Spee's own life ended through his self-sacrifice. He ministered to
plague victims, and then succumbed himself. Spee's life would make a fabulous,
big-budget bio-pic. I'm not holding my breath. Celebrating a heroic Jesuit
priest who helped to end the witch craze is not going to be high on the
priorities of the Hollywood elite.
They don't want you to know about Alonso
de Salazar Frias, "The Witches' Advocate." Salazar was a Spanish
Inquisitor. Contrary to the fake witch narrative circulated by both the Nazi
Albert Rosenberg and bestselling author Dan Brown, Salazar used the Spanish
Inquisition, significantly, to save lives and suppress witch hunting. Salazar
was a careful investigator. He interviewed accused witches and their alleged
magical potions. He found their stories to be inconsistent and their potions to
be unimpressive. He concluded that charges were without merit. He did all this
as a Spanish Inquisitor, allegedly the poster child for irrationality and the
rejection of empiricism.
They don't want you to know about
"Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret
Records of the Roman Inquisition" by German scholar Rainer Decker. Decker discovered,
"much to his surprise," that "the papacy" and "the
Roman and Spanish Inquisitions" "functioned as forces of skepticism
and restraint." Decker's work resists the fake witch narrative "that
mistakenly portrays the papacy as fanning rather than quelling the flames of
the witchcraft mania sweeping northern Europe from the mid-sixteenth century
onward." Decker's book currently has zero reviews on Amazon. "The DaVinci
Code," that tells the fake witch narrative, has over 8,000 reviews.
The fake witch narrative says that the
triumph of science and secularism over religion ended the witch craze. Scholar
Brian P. Levack addresses the end of the witch craze in his book, "The
Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe," and in his essay, "The Decline
and End of Witchcraft Persecutions." I allow him to offer his own summary
of these longer works. In an email, he wrote to me, "The trials did not
end because judicial authorities stopped believing in witchcraft but because
they began to realize that the crime could not be proved at law. It was a lack
of sufficient evidence that led to the acquittal of accused witches and
eventually the reluctance to allow prosecutions in the first place. I call this attitude of judges and
prosecutors 'judicial skepticism', as opposed to a philosophical skepticism
based on rationalism or science. Judicial skeptics did not deny the existence
of witches, only that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute and convict
them."
In his book, "Religion and the
Decline of Magic," Keith Thomas wrote, "The rationalist tradition of
classical antiquity blended with the Christian doctrine of a single
all-directing Providence to produce what Weber called ‘the disenchantment of
the world’ – the conception of an orderly and rational universe, in which
effect follows cause in predictable manner. A religious belief in order was a
necessary prior assumption upon which the subsequent work of the natural
scientists was to be founded. It was a favourable mental environment which made
possible the triumph of technology." In other words, the religious
worldview actually contributed to the decline of belief in magic.
There is, I think, a difference between
my tradition and the worldview of those invested in the fake witch narrative. I
acknowledge that Heinrich Kramer, one of the worst human beings who ever lived,
a man partly responsible for the torture and murder of tens of thousands of
human beings, was Catholic just as I am. Though the fake witch narrative
mispresents Catholic culpability, I know that my church contributed to torture
and death. I feel grief, horror, and shame.
I learned in Catholic school that every
day I must perform a ritual called an "examination of conscience."
Further, I must confess my sins to an other, and ask for, and work for,
absolution.
Believers in the fake witch craze
narrative, from Enlightenment philosophers to Neo-Pagans, from top Nazi Alfred
Rosenberg to contemporary New Atheists, as diverse as they are, do have
something in common. Examination of conscience and confession are not their rituals.
Confronted with evil, rather than looking inward, they look outward. They see
the world divided into light, that is, people like them, and darkness, that is
Catholics like me. They hope for the day when the forces of darkness, that is
people who believe as I do, are no more, and their particular version of their
particular Utopia is established.
I recognize myself in witch craze
accusers. Like them, I am petty, quarrelsome, and fearful. When I read witch
craze accounts, I can see myself among the torturers. I believe, with Paul in
Romans 3, that "no one is righteous; no, not one." I know that my
tradition includes wicked people and has inspired mass murder. I know that the
petty quarrels that sparked witch hunts lurk in my own heart. The difference is
that my tradition contains the command to self-examination, confession,
repentance, and self-correction.
Many struggle to know what to call our
current moment. Are the Woke comparable to Maoist culture revolutionaries? Are
they Jacobins? Are they on a witch hunt? There is a kernel of truth in all
these metaphors.
The handling of the past in the fake
witch narrative is a matter of concern. From Nazis to feminists, from Atheists
to Neo-Pagans, people lie about one of history's worst atrocities. They insist
that only people unlike them could do such bad things. That very mentality
contributed to the witch craze. Unless we learn the lesson that the most common
villain of the witch craze was a neighbor, rendered hysterical by changing
climate, inflation, abandoned religious norms, or disintegrating central
authority, we are all too close to reenacting horror.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
Much of this material is available at
this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJDIE3sHuBU
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