Witch hunting in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.How can such lunacy have possessed humanity for two centuries? It is quite clear that witchcraft, as a systematic cult, was not discovered; it was invented by the inquisitors. The Church advertised the disease they were armed and authorized to cure. The disease was created by its pretended remedy, and guided by above so to speak, the delusion began its fabulous course. It was all barbarous folly.
Witchcraft, said the great Italian scientist Girolamo Cardano, in 1550, was merely an illusion of minds distorted by poverty and undernourishment, and confessions were therefore worthless. But against massive systematic propaganda who can hold out? In short, Clerical machinery was organized; lay intelligence was not, despite the eloquent scorn they could bring to bear on such monkish phantasmagoria. Moreover, the clergy controlled education, so that ultimately the sheer weight of documented bullshit ultimately overwhelmed even the most rational mind. In Catholic countries the clergy, having survived the Protestant threat, redoubled their control over all departments of life, the result being the sacrifice of intellect, a sacrifice made easier by the phenomenon known as the treason of the intellectuals.
The Protestant Reformation was not much help either and they joined the pile-on. “The Bible,” said Calvin firmly, preaching to the Elect about the Witch of Endor, “teaches that there are witches and that they must be slain…God expressly commands that all witches and enchantresses shall be put to death; and this law of God is a universal law.”
So in Geneva, which before had been free of witch trials, Calvin introduced a new reign of terror: in the sixty years after his coming, one hundred and fifty witches were burned. Moreover, in Protestant as in Catholic lands, the rules of evidence were now quietly changed. There was to be no nonsense about proof of material damage: to be a witch, even a harmless witch, was enough.
Thus, as the sixteenth century went on, all Europe, Catholic and Protestant alike, was infected. The clergy vied with each other in ferocious absurdity, the lawyers followed obediently in their wake, and the laws were duly tightened up. Even the intellectuals surrendered such as Jean Bodin and Nicolas Remy, the latter a cultivated scholar who sent two or three thousand victims to the stake; he had children who were said to have attended their mother at the Sabbath flogged in front of the fire in which their mother was burning. Sir Matthew Hale, an enlightened natural scientist and humane reformer of the law, hanged an old woman on the evidence of a wart.( to be continued)…