Witchcraft or Priestcraft
Contents Updated: Thursday, March 09, 2000
- Witchcraft
- The Old Religion
- The Christian Doctrine of the Witch
- Manichaeism
- Bogomiles and Albigensians
- The Catholic Massacres
- The Inquisition
- The Secret Cult
- The Protestant Massacres
- Why are no Christians Weeping in Shame?
Witchcraft
The massacre of women in the witch hunts was tragic even if witches were ugly and malicious old women.
An old woman with a wrinkled face, a furrowed brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back, a spindle in her hand, and a dog by her side—a wretched, infirm and impotent creature, pelted and persecuted by all the neighbours because the farmer’s cart had stuck in the gateway, or some idle boy had pretended to spit needles and pins for the sake of a holiday from school or work.
Any old dame, widow or spinster, who was wise enough to wish to avoid the cackle of her empty headed neighbours was apt to be suspected of witchcraft. The child who fell ill—infected by the open drain or cesspool by the door—had passed her in the street, and so had clearly been bewitched—the mother who had a miscarriage, the farmer whose pigs sickened.
The witch! Drown her! Better still, let the priest see to it, and then the horrors of trial and torture will be added to the injustice. Life was hell to these old dames for near a thousand years after the establishment of the religion which is said to have uplifted woman. Murdering old women happened for many centuries all over Christendom.
Witchcraft was heresy. It was a religious crime. The crime and punishment were entirely Christian. Witches were believed to be empowered by the devil and the Jewish scriptures said that witches should not be permitted to live. The Holy Ghost fell upon the clerics and told them to torture, burn or drown hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million, mainly women because they were witches.
The vivid faith of those heroic days made people more sensitive to the devil’s work in the world.
This is the Christian excuse. “Sorry for the old ladies, of course, but… You can understand it, can't you?” So, the murdered woman was a soured, demented, misanthropic old dame with one foot in the grave. Does that justify the crime? How many dead old women is a cathedral worth? Christians seem to think the beauty of a cathedral is worth the death of a few crusty and squint-eyed old women.
But the witches were not mainly old women. Women of all ages, from the infant on, were arraigned. A little girl of eight years was solemnly tried for witchcraft by the Inquisition because playmates said that she could make mice. The poor child had made “mice” by folding and knotting her handkerchief into some fancied resemblance to mice.
The dangerous women were mainly seen as younger women. Feeble old dames were a minority. Thousands of maids in their teens, like Joan of Arc were drowned or burned at the stake as witches. In the many reports of witch trials, maidens are more common than old women, and young women in their twenties and thirties, defiant of the priests, were most likely to be dragged before the Roman Inquisition or the Protestant bishop. Women of every rank appear in the lists of victims. And among them were men—more often than people think—men of every rank and degree of education or illiteracy, including priests, nobles and officials and leaders of armies as well as peasants and artisans.
A letter written in Wurzburg in 1629 goes:
There are still four hundred in the city, high and low, of every rank and sex—nay, even clerics—so strongly accused that they may be arrested any hour. Some out of all offices and faculties must be executed, clerics, counsellors, doctors, city officials and court assessors. There are law students to be arrested. The prince bishop has over forty students here who are to be pastors, thirteen or fourteen of these are said to be witches. A few days ago a dean was arrested, two others who were summoned have fled. The notary of our church consistory, a learned man, was yesterday arrested and put to torture. In a word, a third part of the city is involved. A week ago a maiden of nineteen was put to death, of whom it is everywhere said that she was the fairest in the whole city and was held by everybody a girl of singular modesty and purity. She will be followed by seven or eight others of the fairest. There are three hundred children of three or four years of age who are said to have had intercourse with the devil. I have seen put to death children of ten, promising pupils of ten, twelve, fourteen, fifteen.
The Old Religion?
So, witches were not just crazed old women. The significance of the witch movement has been missed for a long time by scholars. In Italy today witchcraft is still called “la vecchia religione—the old religion”. Here was an historical phenomenon apparently derived from Pagan sources.
The young women met the sentence of death in the same spirit as the female martyrs of the early Church, but one was possessed by the devil and the others were possessed of the Holy Ghost! They spat at the religion of their Christian persecutors and said they had a higher religion and would die rather than abjure it. The Church demanded that they be tortured to extract “voluntary” confessions, but conversions obtained by torture were not admitted by the Church as sincere so the witches were put to death anyway. Most, therefore, would not convert and suffered death in silence, but some defied their torturers and cried out: “I die for a greater faith than Jesus”.
Behaviour like this implies that witchcraft was a religion. Margaret A Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe argued this convincingly but Christian scholars maintained her case was spurious or overstated, and now it is a forgotten book. The power of the Church and its footsoldiers in academia to sideline and ignore critical work remains unbelievable in an otherwise rational world. Murray concludes:
The evidence proves that underlying the Christian religion was a cult practiced by many classes of the community, but chiefly by the more ignorant or those in the less thickly inhabited parts of the country. It can be traced back to pre-christian times and appears to be the ancient religion of western Europe. The god, anthropomorphic or theriomorphic, was worshiped in well defined rites, the organization was highly developed, and the ritual is analogous to many other ancient rituals. The dates of the chief festivals suggest that the religion belonged to a race which had not reached the agricultural stage… It was a definite religion with beliefs, ritual, and organization as highly developed as that of any other cult in the world.
The ignorant were, through the Church’s destruction of education, at least ninety five percent of the people of Europe, so the assertion is not surprising but the letter quoted above shows that others classes were implicated. In fact, the witch movement was often strongest and most widespread in the most enlightened or least illiterate, centuries of the Middle Ages. Witchcraft was organized heresy, a formidable revolt against Christianity.
Some say witchcraft could not have been the ancient Pagan religion of Europe, because witches were not organized until the thirteenth century. But the real question is the degree to which the old religion was disrupted by having to operate underground and harassed by the Church. The persistence or recovery of its organization could have varied from place to place and time to time.
The Christian Doctrine of the Witch
Every stage of human evolution has something corresponding to the witch, that is dreaded. The spirits of the dead were thought of as malignant and malevolent, and some people were thought to act with them by practising “black magic,” to make curses and cause storms, blight, illness or death. The Romans thought Hades was the home of shades, the shadows of dead people, vacant and insubstantial, but they believed in magic and its evil powers. The magician was exposed to a sentence of death in Roman law and was often executed, but the law was secular not religious—the black magician was dangerous to the community.
The Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians believed that myriads of demons hovered about the earth and caused all the evils of humanity, and that a class of these malignant beings moved about at night, inspiring bad dreams, and sucking the blood of sleepers. This belief in devils passed through the Jews, into Christianity, and beliefs in night prowlers and blood suckers or entrail suckers, vampires, harpies and banshees spread in the west. The Greek and Latin word strix, which properly means the screech owl was applied to these dreaded night birds.
The Fathers of the Church, particularly St Augustine, denounced magic as “Pagan” and as a collusion with the devils. The synods of Elvira (306 AD), Ancyra (314 AD) and Laodicea (375 AD), and the sermons of St Chrysostom and the other great preachers, show that Christians bore the magical practices and vices of the Pagan world. Denouncing these as Pagan seemed not to work, so St Augustine worked out a more deadly theory—the magician was in league with the devil. The Bible was clear about such people. Leviticus 20:27 and Exodus 22:18 defined a witch as one who “hath a familiar spirit” and condemned him or her to death. Moreover, the Latin and Catholic Bible translates verse 5 of Psalm 96, which reads:
For all the gods of the nations are idols,
as:
The gods of the heathen are devils.
Paganism and Satanism coincided! This blatant mistranslation, a Christian practice common until this day, was responsible for numberless tragedies. The Roman persecution of magicians was based entirely on the belief that they had abnormal powers, and the progress of enlightenment might have undermined this belief. But if magic meant collusion with the devil, belief in it was sure to be magnified under a religion which taught that the world swarmed with devils. This doctrine of the devil elaborated by the great theologians of the Middle Ages caused the massacres of witches in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Surprisingly, witches were not persecuted much before the thirteenth century. The thirteenth century began it.
The Salic Law in south Germany sentenced the blood sucking nocturnal creatures (striga) to death. The Lombard Law treated the idea as a superstition. Under Charlemagne a synod held at Paderborn in 785 AD enacted:
Whosoever, deceived by the devil, believes, as the Pagans did, that any person is a witch and can devour men, and therefore burns that person, and gives her flesh to others to eat, shall be put to death.
Plainly, the Church had as yet no consistent attitude to striga. It was mainly bothered about erotic magic. In 860 AD the archbishop of Rheims, Hincmar, held a solemn inquiry into the king’s concubine who was supposed to have used erotic magic on the queen. He found devilry proved. But few witches were executed until the eleventh century, when isolated executions appear more frequently in the chronicles.
At the end of the tenth century, Abbot Regino collected together many Church laws and canons. One of these is concerned with witches, but its date and origin are unknown. It says:
And we must not overlook this, that certain wicked women, who have turned aside to Satan, seduced by the illusions and phantasms of the demons, believe and profess that during the night they ride with Diana [or Herodias] the goddess of the Pagans and an innumerable crowd of women on certain beasts, and pass over great spaces of the earth during the night, obeying her commands as their mistress, and on certain nights are summoned to her service. Would that these had perished in their perfidy and had not dragged many with them to destruction! For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe that these things are true and so depart from the faith and fall into the error of the Pagans, believing that there is some divinity apart from the one God.
The devil assumes various forms to tempt silly women. A life of Pope Damasus, of the fourth century, claims that as early as 367 AD a Roman synod acknowledged that women rode on beasts at night with Herodias. A few years after Abbot Regino, Bishop Burkhard of Worms in an independent collection adds vampires:
Some women claim that they can, even while they lie in bed with their husbands, fly out in the air and suck the heart and entrails out of other men who are abed.
By the sixth century, to which Regino’s canon seems to belong, there was something like organized witchcraft in Europe. Numbers of women evidently met by night to honor Diana, the goddess of the moon and of fertility.
Manichaeism
Europe never voluntarily accepted Christianity. Paganism was driven into dark corners, but age by age the Church had to thunder against it. The women in particular clung to their Diana, surely representing the mother earth goddess. Sterility was a curse in those days, however convenient it may seem to moderns. Everything that could counteract it, the aid of a goddess, or even the mutual inspiration of a human orgy—was treasured. The cold advice of Christianity to pray to Mary, was less effective in practice and less congenial than the nocturnal adventure, but it had to be conducted with secrecy.
Murray supposes that these organized gatherings persisted and reappeared as the witches of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Dianists disappear and for centuries the Church deals only with individual magicians, male or female. But a new element was meantime entering European life, and it throws a fascinating light upon witchcraft. Thomas Aquinas with his absurd demonology and the Inquisition with its terrible scent for heresy are said to have created witchcraft. Perhaps it was otherwise.
Christianity was imposed by force upon a reluctant Europe. Although Western Europeans were robbed of their schools and detained for ages in the densest ignorance, in immense multitudes, they repeatedly rebelled against the corrupt priestcraft and the absurd Christian religion. Only by the use of murderous force on a huge scale did the Church keep its authority.
Witchcraft was a way of resisting the imposed religion. An important rival to Christianity in the fourth century had been Manichaeism. The writings of St Augustine, who was a turncoat Manichaean, show us how heroically its adherents fought for their creed after imperial decrees had declared, under pain of confiscation and death, that Christianity was to be the sole religion of the empire.
Manichaeism was an ascetic religion, based on the ancient Persian belief in two supreme principles, one of light and goodness, the other of darkness and evil. It had much in common with Christianity but was purer, less corrupt and more coherent. Eventually, imperial troops crushed Manichaeism but Manichaean ideas still played a part in Europe. Religious bodies slander and vilify rival bodies. The Romans accepted strange rumours about the secret gatherings of the Christians. They were said to indulge in sensual orgies, to worship a god with an ass’s head and to kill babies for sacramental purposes. Later the Christians vilified the Manichees, though St Jerome admits that they were more strictly virtuous than Christians. Augustine set out to blacken them.
Like an Inquisitor of the later Inquisition, Augustine made a public examination of two Manichees. The first was a girl of twelve. By leading questions, the pious elderly bishop drew from the child the confession that the Manichees made their sacrament of human semen and flour. The second victim was a sacred virgin of the sect. Augustine charged her with what he had put into the mouth of the little girl, putting to her that, to make the sacrament, she had lain nude on the ground, a little heap of flour beside her, and the priests had had intercourse with her to produce the semen.
She protested that she was a virgin but Augustine’s midwives examined her and declared that she was not. Then, Augustine says, she confessed the whole “abominable crime”. She sought to escape the punishment of her heresy by feigning conversion. Later we hear of similar examinations on Manichaean women and confessions of intercourse with “the devil,” meaning his representative, the Manichaean priest.
Manichaean ideas were thrust out of sight, but they broke out again from time to time. A famous heretics of the Greek Church, Paul of Samosata, was the son of a Manichaean mother. His heresy combined the Manichaean principle of two supreme powers with an early form of Protestantism or evangelical Christianity. The Greek Church and Eastern Empire, which had never been tainted by barbarian invasions, in the eighth century were appallingly corrupt and Manichaeism, a purer religion, spread widely, especially among the Armenians.
Emperor after emperor tried to suppress it. The Empress Theodora, wife of Justinian called “the Great” for his services to Christ, put to death no less than one hundred thousand members of the sect, making fifty times as many Manichaean martyrs, in a few years, as the Pagans had made Christian martyrs in three centuries. Finally, in the tenth century, no less than two hundred thousand members of the sect were transplanted from Armenia to Thrace, to form a living bulwark against the encroachments of the Bulgars.
Bogomiles and Albigensians
Within a short time the Paulicians had spread their gospel peacefully among the Bulgars, and Europe was confronted with a new heresy, the Bogomiles. The Albigensians, of the south of France, who were drowned in their own blood by the “greatest” of the Popes, Innocent III, were inspired by the Bogomiles and had the same tincture of Manichaean ideas, as were the Waldensians, the Cathari and the Patarenes. The orthodox Catholics of France called them “bougres,” for Bulgars, and so the name of innocent people became one of the worst swear words used. They were reproached with having a pope in Bulgaria. From the tenth century onward, this revulsion against orthodox Christianity and its corrupt priests and monks spread over Europe like a salvation army.
The Dianists of the sixth and seventh centuries had gone, and until the twelfth century we find only a few isolated executions of witches for practising black magic. In the twelfth century, more occurred. In the thirteenth century, the Church called on swords and fire in the Inquisition to suppress heresy. From then on witchcraft was recognized by the Church as a secret heresy and a widespread organization.
The Paulicians, Bogomiles, Albigensians and so on were slandered by the orthodox. Psellus, one of the leading Greek orthodox writers of the tenth century, says the heretics used to meet at night by candle light and invoke the devils. When these appeared as animals, the lights were extinguished and the worshipers indulged in an orgy of sexuality with the devils and with each other. This story was applied to the heretics all over Europe. A letter of Pope Gregory IX written in 1233 AD to the bishops of Germany, urging them to seek out and persecute the heretics, shows the connexion with witchcraft.
The Pope says that amongst these heretics “when a neophyte is received there appears to him a kind of frog,” though some say it is a toad. Some kiss it shamelessly on the buttocks, others on the mouth, drawing the tongue and spittle of the animal into their mouths. Sometimes this toad is “as big as a goose or a duck”. The neophyte next encounters a “man of extraordinary paleness, with deep black eyes, and so thin that his skin seems to be stretched over his bones”. The neophyte kisses him and finds that he is “as cold as ice”.
The worshippers then sit to table, and a large black cat comes out of a statue, and all of them in the order of their dignity, kiss its buttocks. The lights are extinguished and there is the usual orgy of sexual intercourse. If, the Pope gravely explains, there are more men than women, or women than men, they resort to sodomy. The candles are relit, and they sit again at table, when from a dark corner of the room comes a man “shining like the sun from the loins upward, but rough as a cat below”. To this devil the neophyte is presented, and the faithful also give consecrated hosts which they have stolen from the churches where they have communicated.
These heretics, the Pope says, declare that God is a tyrant, and that he unjustly condemned Lucifer to hell. Lucifer is the real creator of the world and prince of men, and in the end he will regain his place.
The details of the beliefs of the Paulicians and Bogomiles are obscure, the sources only being their enemies. They seemed to have derived their ideas from the Persian religion via the Gnostics. The Zoroastrians had believed that the evil principle had created matter which was evil. To Christians the evil principle was Lucifer, and the new heretics argued that Lucifer was one of the two sons of God, unjustly cast off by an overbearing father. He became their “prince” and “lord,” and unlike the Persians they believed that he would ultimately triumph.
The Manichaeans had been ascetic, deeming the flesh, as part of the creation of the evil principle, an evil thing, and it is clear that the Albigensians and other European heretics also led strict lives. But the glorification of Lucifer meant that matter and the flesh could scarcely be regarded as evil, and a reaction into orgies was inevitable. The witches, at least, had such orgies.
John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres in the twelfth century, and others refused to believe in the striga. Pope Silvester II, Gerbert, was himself accused of magic. Moorish influence was beginning to teach Europe the elements of wisdom. And it was the crown of this new development, the Scholastic movement, which completed the evolution of the witch and let loose the murderous forces of the Church.
The Catholic Massacres
Christianity’s dependence on the people’s ignorance and dislike of history allows it to pretend it beneficially transformed Europe when Paganism was suppressed. Christians certainly think this and few of the non-committed care about anything other than the present day, so they accept school history, which is Christian history, and it is false. Christianity transformed Europe from the practical, natural civilization of Paganism into dense ignorance, indifferent brutality and social disorder. The Christian apologist, faced with evidence that Europe did not immediately benefit from Christianity, blames the initial collapse of society on to the barbarians, but insists that the benefits of Christianity emerged later.
Yet, the barbarians were already Christian when they invaded, though not Catholics, and why did Europe continue to decline for centuries after the barbarians had onverted to Catholicism? New and appalling evils were being created even into the Middle Ages.
The Scholastic movement, the rise of the great theologians of the Middle Ages, was one of the effects of the civilizing influence of the Moors, but the scholarship of the scholars was arid and sterile speculation pointless and repellent to the modern mind. Instead of discovering the fraudulent bases of the power of the Church, they encouraged it to exploit and torture humanity worse than ever. Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274 AD, was an obese Dominican monk so drugged by his religion, like modern day Southern Baptists, that be could have proved the Popes had passed through the eye of a needle to get into the Vatican.
Thomas turned his scholastic powers to deal with devils. He confirmed the world was full of devils and they were just as busy as Pope Gregory the Great had imagined. Devils definitely allowed witches to fly through the air by night, copulated with human beings, and had children:
When children are born of the intercourse of devils with human beings, they do not come from the seed of the devil or of the human body he has assumed, but of seed which he has extracted from another human being. The same devil, who as a woman, has intercourse with a man can also, in the form of a man, have intercourse with a woman.
The case for the witches was confirmed by the highest authority in Christendom. Succubi or female demons and incubi or male demons tormented the sexes with lascivious experiences by night—a medieval equivalent of UFO abductions. It is impossible to believe anything other than that the modern obsession with alien abduction, nocturnal examination and intercourse has the same psychological origins as the obsessions of Aquinas and the Church in these centuries. The more saintly and chaste the person, the worse they were attacked by these devils.
In the year after the death of Aquinas, a woman was for the first time condemned as a witch for having intercourse with the devil, and was burned. The Dominican monk and Inquisitor, Hugo de Boniols, condemned her. He was trying heretics at Toulouse and amongst them was a noble lady, Angela de la Barthe, fifty six years old, accused of witchcraft.
Refined and wealthy, she nevertheless confessed under torture that she spent the nights in lasciviousness with the devil, and that she had given birth to a child with a wolf’s head and a serpent’s tail, which had to be fed on the flesh of babies. She used, she said, to go out nightly and steal babies for the purpose. Whether this monster, which often occurs in confessions, was a figment of the inquisitors or a recollection of a miscarriage or stillbirth, is hard to say. Pregnant women will have miscarried under torture, when the ignorant priestly torturers would have regarded the poor foetus as a monstrosity.
Thomas Aquinas was and still is regarded as a genius of the Church, but the witch hunts and the charred remains of millions in the centuries afterwards are his true memorial, and of the Dominican order and the inspired wisdom of his Church. Sprenger estimates that nine million witches were put to death—it was “certainly not an exaggeration”. Christians and non-christians alike, today, call it a decided exaggeration, as if it makes it less horrible that it was a few million less.
The Inquisition
The Inquisition put thirty thousand to death. In Lorraine, Judge Remy boasted he sentenced nine hundred in fifteen years. In the diocese of Como, a thousand were executed in a year. In three months in 1515, six hundred witches were burned in the bishopric of Bamberg, and nine hundred in the bishopric of Wurzburg. In five years, a fifth of the six hundred inhabitants of the small town of Lindheim were burned as witches. Henri III of France alone might have accounted for thirty thousand. And the Protestant massacres had not yet begun.
Christian Popes and scholars perpetrated atrocities in comparison with which the persecutions of early Christians by the Roman authorities is a trifle, and which have been exceeded in intensity in the west only by Hitler’s holocaust against Jews, communists and homosexuals.
Books about witches and devils began to appear, in 1211 AD, 1220 AD and 1233 AD, this latter being Pope Gregory IX’s endorsement. Then the Inquisition and the suppression of open heresy inaugurated the terrible massacres. Pope Innocent III bears the heaviest responsibility.
To speed up the rate of conviction, in 1232 Gregory IX took the inquiry or “inquisitio” from the local bishops and centralized it in the charge of the Dominican monks acting directly under Rome. The Inquisition was thus founded as a Papal institution, but it was Innocent III, earlier in the century, who had given it a bloody example to follow. When the heretics of the south of France had laughed at the arguments of his legates, he had stooped to the device of appealing to the greed and lust of all the available military adventurers, and had declared the “crusade” which is known in history as the massacre of the Albigensians.
Pope Gregory particularly directed the Inquisitors to seek heretics who were in league with the devil. Thomas Aquinas gave the Church a finished manual of devilry, and before the end of the century the Inquisitors in the south of France were condemning women for compacts or cohabitation with the devil. Such trials were still few, until another Pope, John XXII, gave an impulse to the campaign.
The Papal court was then at Avignon. The hundred years of comparative virtue since Hildebrand, which had followed a hundred and fifty years of vice, were now over and the Papacy was as corrupt as ever. Petrarch called the “sacred palace” at Avignon “the sink of all vices,” and there were certainly not many vices that were not practiced by the cardinals. One was black magic and when, in 1320 AD, some cardinals sought to bring about the death of the Pope by magical means, John began to take a peculiar interest in the black art.
In every part of Europe the tribunals of the Inquisition now became busy with witches. Between 1320 and 1350 the tribunal at Carcassonne tried more than four hundred cases of magic and half led to execution. At Toulouse, six hundred were charged and two thirds were executed. Of course, the robes and alabaster hands of the clergy were not stained with this blood—religious murder was carried out by the “secular arm”. People were massacred in Switzerland and many were burned in Italy. An English bishop was accused at Rome of paying homage to the devil.
An early case of witchcraft was in Ireland. Lady Alice Kyteler or Kettle was a noblewoman, who, with her son, daughter and others, was arrested and tried. A pot of ointment found in her room was declared to be witch ointment, made of the blood and fat of murdered children to give witches the power of flying through the air on a broomstick. The Inquisitor found she had had criminal intercourse with the devil, whose name is given as Robin Artison, and she was condemned. Lady Alice was smuggled away to England by her noble friends but a young woman associated with her was executed.
The bishop of Kilkenny, reporting the event, spoke of “this new pestilential set,” suggesting it was seen as a new phenomenon, and other clerics of the time confirm it as a phenomenon of the fourteenth century or second half of the thirteenth century. When the persecutors were active at Berne in 1337, they complained that the pest had haunted the city “about sixty years”. The Dominican Inquisitor, Jaquier, spoke in 1458 of this recent” sect which held “synods of the devil,” and ended its meetings with orgies. The Inquisitor, Bernard of Como, wrote that the secta strigarum, the witch sect, arose in the first half of the fourteenth century.
Joseph McCabe thinks it refutes the idea that witchcraft is a continuation of an ancient religion. By the end of the thirteenth century the semi-Manichaean heresy which had spread from Armenia and Bulgaria to France was driven underground by the Inquisition or annihilated by troops. Witchcraft might have been the name the Church used against Albigensians and related heresies practising in secret.
In 1390, the Paris Parliament had checked the persecution by transferring trials to the civil tribunals, but some decades later the clerics, who complained much of lay skeptics, returned to their work. A professor of Paris University, W Adeline, was in 1453 brought before the bishop for denying the reality of witchcraft. In face of the terror, the scholar fell on his knees, weeping, and confessed that he was himself in league with the devil and had trampled on the crucifix. He was leniently dismissed with a sentence of imprisonment for life.
The clerics had regained power, and they made a fearful use of it. At Douai, a woman was brought before the Inquisition on the ground that she was a Waldensian. She was forced to name names, and they in turn denounced others, until a large number of victims confronted the Inquisitor. Under a promise of light sentences if they confessed, they all glibly agreed that they had gone to witch meetings on oiled broomsticks, had met the devil in the form of a goat or ape, and had concluded with a general orgy. The savage Inquisitor then handed them over to the secular arm, and they, protesting that they had been deceived into making the statements, said that it was all false. Six were executed.
The Inquisitor next year sought to repeat his triumph at Amiens, but the good bishop, who seems to have been a sinner, pooh poohed the story and discharged the accused. The Inquisitor went on to Arras, where the bishop was more pious or more greedy, and the charges spread from house to house until there was a reign of terror in the city. Under torture—one woman was tortured fifteen times—they recklessly denounced any acquaintance to get relief. A large number of victims were condemned, and men and women fled in panic from the city, which actually lost its commercial prestige. In 1491, the lawyers of the Paris Parliament took up the cases, analyzed the records, and found that the whole of them had been wrongly condemned, and by royal order this finding of the Parliament was nailed on the door of the bishop’s palace.
Except in England, torture was habitually used in the examination of witnesses, and the tortures were fiendish. There was one especially used for women accused of witchcraft. This was a chair the seat of which was either studded with spikes—one chair had two thousand—or a metal plate under which a fire was lit. There the poor creatures sat until they either accused themselves or a neighbour of consorting with the devil—or died.
At Lindheim, where the most fearful persecution occurred, six women were executed because they confessed, under torture, that they had stolen the body of a child for purposes of witchcraft. After the execution, the husband of one of the women opened the grave and found the child’s body there uninjured, and the monk Inquisitor declared the body to be a counterfeit made by the devil and ordered it to be burned!
The Inquisition imposed heavy fines and confiscated the goods of its victims. The clergy, the Inquisitors, and the informers who were never named in court, shared these funds. Such procedure would disgrace fascists. Thousands of victims of the Inquisition had only one heresy: a good bank account.
The Popes were responsible for the new epidemic. Engenius IV had, in 1437 AD, urged the Inquisitors to look out for witches. They found plenty in France, Italy and Switzerland but in Germany their zeal was checked by comparatively humane rulers and bishops. The spirit that begot the Reformation was growing. But the German Inquisitors, Institor and Sprengel, reported to Rome that Germany was full of witches of both sexes, and that they formed a well organized sect.
A book had been published in German so describing them, and Pope Innocent VIII issued his famous Bull, “Summis Desiderantes,” in 1484 AD, lashing the clergy everywhere to the attack on witches. The Inquisitors themselves two years later compiled a manual for the use of judges—the notorious “Hammer of Witches, or Malleus Maleficarum”—and Europe again stank with burning flesh and echoed with the groans of tortured women.
Joan of Arc was burned as a witch by the Church in 1431 and, for political reasons, declared a saint by the same Church in our time. Margaret Murray says Joan was a witch. Maids of Joan’s age were frequently witches. Joan’s greatest friend in the French army, Gilles de Rais or Retz was a witch. He became a Marshal at the age of twenty five and he is regarded as “one of the finest intelligences of the time”. But he was mad, and when he left the army to pursue magical studies in his chateau, he fell into scandalous excesses, even killing children for his experiments. He is “Bluebeard”. Murray thinks he vacillated between the two religions, but he confessed to being a witch and he was executed for it. Joan chose him as her special protector in the army, and he was devoted to her.
The evidence in regard to Joan is puzzling and contradictory. Time after time when she was asked a question, and an emphatic negative answer would be expected from any orthodox Christian, she refused to reply or replied evasively. She would not say if she believed fairies to be, as the Church certainly held, evil spirits. She would not explicitly reply when it was said that she had been taught witchcraft and magic. She would not swear on the gospels, and would not repeat the Paternoster except in confession.
She had seen “St Michael” with her own eyes, in the shape of a “good man”. Her “St Catherine” was physically present somehow in her prison. She had seen “God,” in a scarlet cap and long white robe. She spoke throughout of “those of my party”—she had a secret sign on her letters for them—and she sometimes saw her saints, or the sources of her voices, “among Christians”. She was evidently not a perfectly orthodox Christian.
The Secret Cult
What was witchcraft? The prevailing, almost universal, opinion of those who at length rose against the persecution, and of the nineteenth century writers on witchcraft, was that the cult and all the details alleged about it were a creation of popular credulity and the imagination of monks.
The secret meetings or Sabbaths were thought to have been as fictitious as the ride through the air on a greased broomstick. The “devil” who is put as the central object of the cult was declared a fiction. The witches' mark, the orgies, the homage, and all the rest were regarded as wholly imaginary.
Inquisitors wrote their manuals of these things, and the unfortunate men and women confessed whatever they willed in order to put an end to the diabolical tortures. Death for witchcraft was preferable to prolonged torment, and few were ever acquitted by the Inquisition.
Thousands of victims of the witch hunters were good Christians, driven by torture to confess anything that the torturer wanted. Suicide was common amongst them. Remy, the French judge, says that he knew fifteen cases of suicide in one year. But can the whole of the details be ascribed to imagination, fear, hysteria, or sex obsession?
Torture was not used in England. A fiendish witch finder like Hopkins had his own irregular way of torturing the women he suspected, but after arrest and during trial they were questioned without torture, and they tell the same story as the tortured witches of the continent. Margaret Murray deals especially with English witches, and she makes this clear. They often gloried in their “religion”. At Northampton a mother and daughter were led together to the scaffold. A priest exhorted them to pray, and “they both set up a loud laughter,” says an eye witness, “calling for the devil to come and help them,” and deriding Christianity.
Nor are all the testimonies to witchcraft merely the statements of prisoners. There was a remarkable case at Lille in 1661. A home for poor and ignorant girls was presided over by a Mme. Bourignon, a pious Christian, and she was horrified to discover that thirty two of the girls were witches. They explained that they had been dedicated in the religion as children and would not abandon it and become Christians. A young woman of twenty two whom she tried to convert, said:
No, I will not be other than I am: I find too much content in my condition.
A common observations of the less fanatical and sometimes distressed Inquisitors was that many witches “blasphemed” to the end and took pride in their religion. Some sought death with equanimity and, had they been Christians facing the Romans, would have been canonised. Most of the Christian saints are fictitious anyway, and the stories of their martyrdom were taken from the bravery of Pagan martyrs facing Christian torture, of which there were many times more than persecuted Christians.
De Lancre, the famous French lawyer and judge of the seventeenth century, made a close study of the witches he tried and he wrote one or two books about them. Instead of finding the women terrorized by torture into confessing anything that the examiners wanted them to admit, he notes with great surprise and perplexity that they tell a consistent story, deliberately and even joyfully adhere to it, and unquestionably have a real religion. McCabe gives his translarion of the old French:
A distinguished witch tells us that she has always believed that witchcraft is the best religion. Jeanne Dibasson, twenty nine years old, tells us that the Sabbath is the true Paradise where there is more pleasure than one can express. Marie de la Ralde, twenty eight years old, a beautiful young woman, deposes that she takes special pleasure in going to the Sabbath… as to a wedding, not so much for the liberty and license they have together (which, from modesty, she says she has never done or seen done) but because the devil kept their hearts and will so attached that it was hardly possible for any other desire to enter… She went there with much more pleasure than to Mass, for the devil gave them to understand that he was the real God…
There are witches so devoted to his diabolical service that no torture or torment can surprise them, and they say that they go to a real martyrdom and to death for love of him as gaily as they would go to a festival or a public rejoicing. When they are arrested, they do not weep or shed a single tear, either over their false martyrdom or the torture, and the scaffold is to them so pleasant that some of them are in a hurry to be executed, and they joyously endure the trial, they are in such a hurry to be with the devil.
Such testimony is not wrung from terrorized witnesses. An abundance of cases show the witch defiantly meeting her end with the witch creed on her lips, whereas a Christian tortured into momentary “confessions” would pray for mercy and repentance. The reality of witchcraft was an organized anti-Christian religion, and the main features of the cult seem consistent in different countries, despite variations.
McCabe does not think it had to do with ancient Paganism. Christian clerks or judges write that the central deity of the religion is “the devil,” so the religion seems to be monotheistic. The witches insist that this being is “the true god”. He is their lord, master and prince, and they disdain Christianity.
Tthe witches themselves used the word devil, the accounts saying that “the devil” was the real God. An early Christian legend says that Lucifer’s only sin was pride—which is not a sin—and even Milton comes near to making a god of Satan in his “Paradise Lost”. It is the Gnostic-Manichaean idea, or confusion of ideas. The principle of darkness and matter is Lucifer, he is no longer evil, and he will eventually triumph. It is to reunion with him that the dying witches look forward.
Lady Kyteler of Kilkenny had her “Robin Artison”. “Robin” seems to have been a common name for this mysterious chief. He visits the witches in their houses or in quiet places. He is incessantly approaching women and pressing them to join the secret religion. As a rule he is dressed in black or other sober ordinary clothes, though he has a special mark on his boot. But his movements are mysterious, and he impresses the women more or less with awe.
None of them whose words are recorded give us a clear idea of how they conceived the relation of this chief to Lucifer. The better educated witches, as a rule, tell us nothing of their creed, and the ignorant women gabble. To most of them the chief seems a semi-supernatural person, though in some cases they frankly speak of him as a well known man of their own district, the secret organizer of the sect.
The chief had an assistant who helped to give notice of meetings, and so on. This man seems to have succeeded to the mastership when the chief died. There were no elections, so that the succession must have been by nomination. Heads of the local groups or “covens” also were appointed. The local unit of the cult was a group of thirteen men and women or twelve and a leader called a “coven,” from the same root (Old French, “convenir,” to come together) as “convene” and “convention,” and even “covenant”. Does it reflect Christ and his twelve disciples, or the sun and its twelve constellations?
The great assemblies or Sabbaths were at the primitive festival times, spring and autumn. The first, the Walpurgis Night of the German witches, was held on the eve of 1st May, and the second on the eve of 1st November. Later, a midsummer Sabbath and one at Christmas were added, and in places there were other festivals on the Christian feast days. Lesser meetings were held for business purposes and to report on their magical practices, called Esbats, and in the end these seem generally to have been held on Fridays, perhaps to deride the Christian veneration of Friday, the supposed day of Christ’s death.
The ritual of the Sabbath is so consistently given by the witches everywhere that we can confidently describe it. A few women under torture might “confess” that they had ridden on broomsticks and made ointment of babies' fat, but the reliable witnesses tell a plausible story. Some quiet spot in the neighbourhood, a hill, a wood or an ancient stone monument was appointed for the meeting, and in the dead of night the witches found their way to it, generally on foot, as it was not usually far away, but often on horse or ass. The hour of assembly was midnight, and the festival usually lasted until near dawn.
Paying homage to the chief was the first item. The living representative of Lucifer was on these occasions always disguised, and the women vaguely imagined that they were in the presence of their “god”. They speak of him as having the form of a bull, a goat, an ape, a cat, a dog or some other animal, and it seems clear that at least the lower part of his body was clad in the skin of a sheep or goat, the tail hanging behind. In some cases he seems to have worn a mask at the back of his head or above his tail.
The consistent testimony of numerous reliable witnesses is that homage meant kissing the leader’s buttocks was practically a universal custom. Old members might kiss his face, and even neophytes might be directed to kiss his cheek, arm, or thigh. Curiously enough, for a phallic religion as witchcraft surely was, witches rarely kissed the leader’s phallus, unless the impolite term used for buttocks was a universal euphemism for it.
An important part of this ceremony was that mothers presented their children, particularly baby girls, to the “devil”. The formula given by several witnesses is:
Great Lord, whom I worship, I bring you this new servant who desires to be your slave forever.
The girls, it seems, returned at about the age of nine and repeated the homage in their own names, and the “grand mistress” or “queen of the Sabbath”—some lady who was closely allied with the chief—then directed them to renounce the Christian God, Jesus, the Church, the sacraments, the clergy and monks, and everything connected with the prevailing religion.
In places, at least, they had to trample or spit on a cross marked in the ground. They then kissed the usual sacred part and received what was known throughout the Middle Ages as “the witch’s mark”. In England, especially, much stress was laid on this mark. The witchfinders, knowing that no torture could be used in the trial, as on the continent, concentrated on searching for the witch’s mark in a suspect, and Hopkins effectively used torture in finding it.
The thighs, buttocks and pubic parts of the suspects were minutely examined by the agents of the Holy Church, and every mark or pimple that nature had produced was described in grossly exaggerated language. Supernumerary nipples, which we now know to be fairly common in women, and are even found in men, were selected as indubitable proofs of diabolic action. They seem to have been examined with clerical magnifying glasses, as we read of immense teats in the most surprising parts of the witch’s anatomy.
Those who were initiated to witchcraft at the Sabbaths were marked, but the mark was a simple puncture made with an awl or sharpened bone. Something might have been smeared on the needle, but the “insensible area” for which the witchfinders looked was a figment.
After the entire assembly had paid homage the chief received reports from local officers, and the dance, which seems to have been the most important part of the solemnity, took place. Dancing and feasting occupied the remaining hours of the night. The witches brought food with them and the dance alternated with a feast. Ring dances, especially if there was a sacred stone, were common, and a kind of conga across country was popular. The women often visibly light up with joy as they describe to the judge the wild dance across the country, the “devil” often playing pipes, leading the way, his tail wagging before the crowd, and the long stream of witches, at the highest pitch of excitement, following in a line. The flute, drum, and other instruments also were used.
Murray calls this part of the solemnity “the fertility rites” and no doubt it was in a sense a continuation of the genuine fertility rites of the old religions. But one may conjecture that frank human joy in the sensual abandonment of the hour was the chief motive and one of the chief attractions of the cult. Virtuous witches denied that they had ever seen any impropriety at the Sabbaths. Perhaps, some groups of a purely religious character did not indulge in the nocturnal orgies. The almost unanimous testimony of the witches was of a sexual rite. On these four quarter days, women’s Dionysiac urge was given a freedom not seen since ancient times.
The orgy as such was not the chief rock of offense to the Church. In practice, the Church had never insisted on the quixotic counsels of Christ. What the Inquisitors fastened on was the charge of carnal intercourse with the devil. Commonly the witches, the untortured English witches as well as the continental, confess that they copulated with the devil, at any period after the age of twelve. Was this man a super stud? Murray thinks an artificial phallus was used, its coldness being described. Such things are known in older phallic religions, where women came to the priests to be deflowered.
In some places, either at the Sabbath or elsewhere, the “devil” celebrated a communion ritual. Animals were commonly sacrificed to provide blood, and children too, if some confessions are to be believed. Mme. de Montespan in 1679, in her desire to regain the love of Louis XIV, got the Abbi Guiborg, apparently a witch, to say mass with a child’s blood in the chalice. The child was bought for “a crown”.
Though there is a lot of evidence for child sacrifice, the method by which much of it was obtained and the fact that Christian babies were never so used, cast doubt upon the stories. Christian mothers of the time notoriously guarded their unbaptized children from the witches, but whence were the babies procured if not from Christians?
Another doubt is cast by the claim that the wafer was stolen from the Church. The witches supposedly attended Christian communion but kept the wafer dry in their mouth until out of sight of the Church. The Christian wafer is unlikely to have been so important to the witches. They spat out the wafer, when they were away from the Church, because they refused to accept the communion the Church obliged them to take, but which was to them a sacrilege.
The Protestant Massacres
The religious reformers brought no relief to the witches of Europe. Witchcraft was a bitterly anti-Christian religion, and the reformers were no less hostile to it than the Catholics. The attitude in regard to witchcraft of Luther and Melanchthon is counted by the Jesuits, who succeeded the Dominican and Franciscan monks as Inquisitors, as heterodox. Luther did not believe in witches flying to the Sabbath, but he did believe in magical powers and in the devil. The Protestant emphasis on the devil and on the Bible explicitly condemning the witch to death caused no less cruelty in Protestant countries than in Roman Catholic ones.
More witches were burned in Britain after the Reformation than before it. James I claimed that witches had caused the terrible storms that kept his bride in Denmark. Hopkins and other witchfinders were as bad as the Inquisition, though British Protestant Law never permitted the tortures that Catholic countries permitted, and drove tens of thousands of innocent men and women to false self-accusations, insanity, suicide and the scaffold. The bloody panic in Massachusetts under Cotton Mather in 1691-92 was the same.
Nevertheless, Protestants were the first to question witchcraft. A Lutheran, Johann Weier, regarded the women as possessed by the devil but questioned fantastic events. These arguments were repeated by others in 1584 AD and 1585 AD, before any Catholic writer attacked witchcraft. In 1584, an English squire, Reginald Scott, denied all the alleged phenomena. Catholic writers, the Jesuits, Tanner (1626) and Spee (1631), criticized the persecutions of witches.
Why are no Christians Weeping in Shame?
As believers in a religion sincerely held, the witches were on a level with the Christian martyrs. But, while the Roman emperors put only a few hundred people to death and then to uphold secular laws, the Christian clergy made martyrs by the hundred thousand, if not the million, on purely religious grounds. In Ireland, a witch was burned in a cottage at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Is there no Christian who can reads this without weeping in shame and freely declaring:
No good god could possibly allow such things to be done in his name—even in human ignorance—and continue to trick us with the myth of His goodness.
A religion with the history of persecution of the Christian churches, Catholic or Protestant, cannot honestly claim to be a loving religion. The fact that there are still over a billion Christians in the world, is a testament to their ignorance, their gullibility and their cowardice, and the brazen effrontery of the priests they believe are imbued with the same Holy Spirit as generations of torturers and murderers. They must only feel comfortable because they still think it was right and proper to kill witches as evil. That is why it is Christian priestcraft, despite its temporary human face, that is still the mask of the devil.
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