Witch Hunts

Bodin, Jean (1529–1596) French demonologist and political theorist who encouraged the vicious persecution of witches and helped fan the fires of the Inquisition throughout Europe.

Jean Bodin said that people who denied the existence of witchcraft were witches themselves and said that, with rare exceptions, no accused witch should go unpunished.

Bodin was born in Angers, France.

For a time, he served as a Carmelite monk.

He left the monastery for the University of Toulouse, where he became a professor of Roman law.

Bodin possessed a brilliant intellect and distinguished himself in his studies of philosophy, law, classics and economics. In 1561 he left Toulouse for Paris, where he worked in the service of the king.

But his book Six livres de la république, published in 1576, caused him to fall out of favor with the king because of its concept that sovereign power belonged to the people.

Bodin wrote other works of political theory, but he is best known for his treatise on witchcraft, De la démonomanie des sorciers (The Demonomania of Witches), published in 1580.

The book was an immediate success and was reprinted frequently throughout Europe.

Like the Malleus Maleficarum published nearly 100 years earlier, it served as a guide to witch-hunters and judges in the matters of identifying, prosecuting and executing witches.

Bodin drew on his own experience as a judge at numerous witchcraft trials.

Démonomanie describes witches, their methods of diabolic acts and their abilities, such as pacts with Satan (see Devil’s pact), flying through the air to their sabbats, copulating with incubi and succubi and casting evil spells.

It also acknowledges that there are good daemons as well as evil demons, and that good daemon can communicate with man and provide inspiration.

He himself had such a daemon, who whispered instructions in his ear.

Bodin believed that authorities were too soft in prosecuting witches, whom he saw less as heretics and more as social deviants.

He condoned convicting the accused on the basis of lies by informants, confessions made under torture, secret accusations and false promises of leniency.

He urged local authorities to encourage secret accusations by placing a black box in the church for anonymous letters.

He was adamant about torturing and punishing witches, saying that God would reject those who did not do so:

Those too who let the witches escape, or who do not punish them with the utmost rigor, may rest assured that they will be abandoned by God to the mercy of the witches.

And the country which shall tolerate this will be scourged with pestilences, famines, and wars; and those which shall take vengeance on the witches will be blessed by him and will make his anger cease.

Even children and invalids were not to be spared torture, as Bodin demonstrated time and again by his own example as judge.

Children, he said, should be forced to testify against their accused parents.

One of his favored methods was cauterizing flesh with a red-hot iron and then cutting out the putrefied flesh.

That torture, he said, was mild compared to the hell that awaited the condemned witch.

Bodin took exception with exorcism, however, which he said was both ineffective and dangerous to the exorcist.

Music was preferable as a form of exorcism; in the Old Testament, Saul’s possession had been calmed by music.

Bodin did not believe that a person could cause another to become possessed (see possession).

Bodin savagely criticized Johann Weyer, a Lutheran physician and contemporary, who opposed the burning of witches and maintained they were helpless victims.

Bodin said Weyer’s books should be burned.

Except for Démonomanie, which served the purpose of the church, all of Bodin’s other books on political theory were condemned by the Inquisition.

Bodin died in Laon, a victim of the bubonic plague.

Bridget (d. 1692) The first victim of the Salem Witches hysteria in Massachusetts in 1692–93.

Bridget Bishop was the first to be accused and examined, and the first to be tried and executed.

Bishop was an easy target when the hysteria began.

She was not well regarded by her neighbors, for she owned a tavern and exhibited “loose” behavior.

She dressed provocatively, and some of her younger tavern patrons were known to stay well past closing, drinking and playing games.

According to the testimony lodged against Bishop, she had bewitched a baby and a girl to death, paid a man in disappearing money, caused various mishaps with carts and horses and paid nocturnal visits to a man as a glowing apparition that hopped around his room in a cloak.

She also had bewitched people into serious illnesses, caused people to argue violently and bewitched animals.

John Lowder, 24, a laborer, testified that Bishop tormented him numerous times after they argued over her chickens damaging the gardens of Lowder’s employer.

Lowder said he woke up one night to find Bishop sitting on his chest.

She tried to choke him.

Lowder also said that he had other dark bedroom visitors: a black pig and a flying demon that had the body of a monkey, the feet of a rooster and the face of an old man.

The demon told him he was sent by the Devil and promised him money if he would pledge himself.

Lowder chased the creature out of his room.

It disappeared, but he saw Bishop in the distance.

When he returned to his room, the demon came back.

Lowder invoked God and it flew out, causing apples to fall from trees.

It kicked gravel into Lowder’s stomach, and he was unable to eat for three days.

Cotton Mather said that when Bishop was brought to trial, he had no doubt of her guilt.

With a look, she brought in an invisible demon who damaged part of the courthouse.

Bishop was executed by hanging on June 10, 1692

“It was not witches who burned. It was women.

Women who were seen as

Too beautiful

Too outspoken

Had too much water in the well

Who had a birthmark

Women who were too skilled with herbal medicine

Too loud

Too quiet

Too much red in her hair

Women who had a strong nature connection

Women who danced

Women who sung

or anything else, really.

Sisters testified and turned on each other when their babies were held under ice.

Children were tortured to confess their experiences with “witches” by being fake executed in ovens.

Women were held underwater and if they float, they were guilty and executed.

If they sunk and drowned they were innocent.

Women were thrown off cliffs.

Women were put in deep holes in the ground.

The start of this madness was years of famine, the war between religions, and lots of fear.

The churches said that witches, demons and the devil did exist and women were nothing but trouble.

As we see even today, there is often a scapegoat created.

Everything connected to a woman became feared, especially her sexuality.

It became labeled as dark and dangerous and was the core of the witch trials throughout the world.

Why has this been written?

Because the usage of words are important, especially when we are doing the work to pull these murky, repressed, and forgotten stories to the surface.

Because knowing our history is important when we are building a new world.

When we are doing the healing work of our lineages and as women.

To give the women who have slaughtered a voice, to give them redress and a chance of peace.

It was not witches who burned.

It was women.”

Contrary to popular belief, witches were not burned at the stake in England, after the Reformation.

Instead, death sentences were carried out by hanging.

In Scotland, however, the sentence of burning was still inflicted.

However if the witches had confessed what they were ordered to confess, they were accorded the mercy of being strangled before being burnt.

If they refused to confess, they were burnt alive.

This custom was followed upon the Continent.

As well as this accounts for many of the fantastic confessions were recorded as having been made by witches.

Knowing that they had no hope of escape, they confessed whatever was required.

Much of their alleged crimes were an affront to anyone’s intelligence ­ in order to obtain a more merciful death.

The record of witch-burning in Europe as a whole is a sickening one.

How many people actually perished in the years of witch-hunting can only be guessed at.

It is a story which shames Protestant and Catholic alike.

Although the persecution of witches started under the Catholic Church, the Protestants carried it on with equal inhumanity.

The American authority, George Lincoln Burr, from his studies of the history of witchcraft, has given his opinion that a minimum of ten thousand men, women and children were burned for witchcraft in Germany alone.

It is true that Germany was a country in which the mania for persecution raged with particular fierceness.

Witch-hunting established itself as a profitable business.

The reason for this was not all witches were poor people by any means/

The property and estate of a convicted witch were confiscated, sometimes by the Church authorities, sometimes by the State, or even by the local feudal overlord, depending upon individual circumstances.

All the costs of the trial and execution were charged against the witch’s estate.

Grisly documents setting out the actual tariffs for burning witches in Scotland and elsewhere still exist.

The last witch-burning in the United Kingdom took place in Scotland on June 1722, when an old woman called Janet Horne was burned at
Dornoch on a charge of having lamed her daughter by witchcraft.

At least, this is the last Scottish witch-burning of which we have a definite historical record.

There are rumours of later executions in Scotland.

However, by this time in history not the quality of mercy but eighteenth-century scepticism and rationalism were putting the curb on the witch-hunters.

In 1736 witchcraft ceased to be a capital charge, in Scotland as well as England.

In 1743 this fact was publicly denounced by certain Scottish Churchmen, as being contrary to the express Law of God !

Before the Reformation in England, witches had been treated as heretics, and could be burned under the statute De Haeretico Comburendo, passed in 1401.

But before this date, witch-burnings were already being carried out in the British Isles, as in the case of Petronilla de Meath of Dame Alice Kyteler’s coven in Ireland in 1323.

Looking back at the horrifying records of the burning of witches, one is compelled to wonder how the human mind could consent to such
cruelty.

The answer seems to be that fear played a large part in it, the terror of black magic.

The Christian Church did not invent the punishment of death by burning.

There is the case of Theories, a Greek woman of Lemnos, mentioned by Demosthenes, who was publicly tried in Athens and burned for sorcery.

It is certain that people came to believe that a witch’s influence could only really be destroyed by her body being burnt.

In our own times, the remains of Rasputin, the occultist who was regarded as the evil genius of the Tzarist Court of Russia, were torn from their tomb and burned by the revolutionaries-an act that may have been something more than an expression of hatred alone.

Furthermore, on several occasions in the last twenty years, disturbing stories have leaked out of Mexico, of women being killed and their bodies burned, because they were believed to be witches.

The body of the revolutionary, Che Guevara, was burned and the ashes were scattered, by order of the authorities.

There were occasions in England when women were publicly burned at the stake, after the Reformation.

If a woman were found guilty of witchcraft which involved treason, for instance using occult means for an attempt upon the life of the sovereign, this was punishable by burning at the stake.

Also, for a woman to kill her husband, by witchcraft or any other means, was regarded as ‘petty treason’; and this too was punishable by burning at the stake.

Incredible as it appears, this sentence was actually carried out twice in Sussex as late as the eighteenth century.

In 1752 a woman called Anne Whale was publicly burned at the stake at Horsham for poisoning her husband.

Again in 1776, another woman, a Mrs Cruttenden, was found guilty of killing her husband by cutting his throat as he lay in bed ; · and she, too, was publicly burned at Horsham.

There was no mention of witchcraft in either case ; but this kind of execution, which as we have seen survived to an astonishingly late date, has often been mistaken for a witch-burning.

It is a psychologically interesting fact that it was not equally punishable for a man to kill his wife. This was murder, but not ‘petty treason’;
so it carried only a normal death sentence.

The horrific punishment of burning at the stake was in this instance meted out solely to women.

It seems likely that it was in some deep and unconscious way related to the old practice of burning witches.

In medieval times, there were possibly many issues, political, religious, and otherwise, that brought about the persecution of witches.

Amongst other things, These issues included the religious emphasis on the sin of Eve and the belief in the inferiority of women.

The belief in the inferiority of women had existed since the time of St Paul.

With the rise of an organized male medical profession, women healers who had acted as herbalists and midwives were seen as a threat.

This was not least because their skills ensured less painful childbirth, which was considered contrary to the curse of God that the daughters of Eve should bear children in sorrow.

So midwives were a prime target for the new persecutions and were often accused of sacrificing babies to the Devil.

Given the high rate of infant mortality, this allegation was hard to refute.

A grieving mother might easily blame the midwife for the death of her infant.

At a time of appropriation of common land and the enclosure of smallholdings,  accusations of witchcraft were a popular way of removing peasants.

This could be particularly true for elderly widows or spinsters, reluctant to give up their land rights.

Being found guilty of witchcraft carried the penalty of the seizure of land.

Some researchers have suggested that as late as 1693 in Salem, Massachusetts, the desire to appropriate land was behind at least some of the mass accusations of witchcraft made at the time.

One landowner, Giles Corey, was apparently an innocent witness at the trials at first.

However, he himself was accused of witchcraft and was pressed to death –

This was a torture where heavy stones were placed on the victim’s chest, which took up to three days to kill them

High-ranking practitioners of magick who attempted to conjure demons were usually male and included both popes and royalty.

They generally escaped censure, however.

The folk religion of the countryside was an easier target.

In December 1484, the Bull of Pope Innocent VII was published, appointing Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger as inquisitors against witchcraft and heresy.

These two clerics wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious Hammer of the Witches, which described in lurid detail the tortures that
could be used to obtain confessions from suspected witches.

In it, they adopted the policy that it was better to kill an innocent person who would be rewarded in heaven by God than to allow a guilty
person to remain unpunished.

This book became the bestseller of its time and was quoted to justify the atrocities practiced against witches in mainland Europe and Scandinavia.

Although torture to obtain a confession was not permitted in England except by royal assent, many inquisitors were very cruel even to young victims, who would eventually confess in the hope of having their interrogation brought to an end.

No one really knows how many people have been put to death for witchcraft.

The worst period for witch burnings and hangings in Europe was between the mid-fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries when the number judicially executed as witches during this period is generally accepted to be about a quarter of a million people.

In addition, many more were lynched or hanged unofficially by mobs eager to find a scapegoat to blame for bad harvests or dying cattle.

This unhappy era came to be known as the Burning Times. Matthew Hopkins, who died in 1647, brought about the executions of at least 236 accused witches.

He styled himself as Witchfinder General and, with four hired assistants, instigated a reign of torture and terror especially in the eastern counties of England, amassing a huge fortune for himself in the process.

In the colonies of America, the most notorious trials were those at Salem, held between 1692 and 1693.

During this period of mass hysteria, 141 people from the town and immediate area were arrested, and 19 were hanged.

Even a dog was hanged.

Dorcas Good, a four-year-old child, was the youngest victim to be accused of witchcraft and imprisoned.

She was released on bail after her mother was hanged, but her younger sibling died in prison.

Dorcas was driven insane by her experience.

About three-quarters of all those killed as witches in Europe and Scandinavia were women, mainly lower-class older women, female healers, village herbalists, wise women, and midwives.

With the death of so many experienced healers and wise women, much knowledge was inevitably lost, and for a time infant mortality increased as male physicians took over the roles of the deposed midwives.

But anyone who was different in any way – eccentric, senile, or physically deformed – could be accused.

Any old woman living alone might be blamed for the deaths of animals, the failure of crops, and outbreaks of disease that were in reality caused by poor hygiene and diet, bad weather, human neglect, or simply blind Fate.

Of course, this occurred to some extent before the Burning Times.

The difference was that now the Church and State were legalizing and even encouraging this persecution.

Even faeries became associated with witchcraft.

The Bean-Tighe, a faerie housekeeper, popular in the mythology of Ireland and Scotland, was said to reside with the village wise woman and assist her with chores; in the worst of the wave of hysteria over witchcraft, if an old woman had an immaculate house, it was claimed she
had faerie help – and so by implication was consorting with the Devil.

Under torture, even the innocent would admit to the vile deeds suggested by their inquisitors.

Many of the confessions now appear to be remarkably uniform and come straight from the pages of the works on demonology, with which the members of the Inquisition would be familiar.

Simple village circle dances performed at the time of the full moon and the old rituals performed to bring fertility to both fields and people – with a figure dressed as the Horned God and couples making love in the fields or leaping over a bonfire – became all too easily translatable into evidence of satanic covens.

Although the last person executed for witchcraft in England was Alice Molland at Exeter in 1712, it was not until 1951 that the Witchcraft Act of 1736 was repealed and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act.

Those who continued to practice the ‘old ways’ were usually families who could be trusted not to betray the secrets, although the fires of the Lughnassadh (the first corn harvest) continued in remote areas until well into the late nineteenth century and are being revived by pagans as community celebrations, especially in the USA.

The secret family covens would pass the traditions down through the matriarchal line, usually by word of mouth.

Those who could write recorded their spells and rituals in ‘Books of Shadows’ – so-called partly because of the secrecy required to write and protect them.

These were usually buried or burned with the witch on her death, or on rare occasions were handed on to the eldest daughter.