A Brief  History of  Persecutions

circa 560 B.C.

The Bible condemns witches

Exodus 22:18 Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.  (KJV)
 Leviticus  20:27 A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them. (KJV) Exodus and Leviticus, two Old Testament books that make up part of the "Law of Moses" and the primary history of the Jewish people, were written in the sixth century B. C by a Jewish writer.

**************

circa 420

St. Augustine argues witchcraft is an impossibility

 

Saint Augustine of Hippo, an influential theologian in the early Christian Church, argued in the early 400s that God alone could suspend the normal laws of the universe.  In his view, neither Satan nor witches had supernatural powers or were capable of effectively invoking magic of any sort.  It was the "error of the pagans" to believe in "some other divine power than the one God."  Of course, if witches are indeed powerless, the Church need not overly concern itself with their spells or other attempts at mischief.

The late medieval Church accepted St. Augustine's view, and hence felt little need to bother itself with tracking down witches or investigating allegations of witchcraft.

*****************

1208
 Satan becomes sinister following
Pope Innocent III's attack on Cathar heretics

 

In 1208, Pope Innocent III opened an attack on Cathar heretics who believed in a world in which God and Satan, both having supernatural powers, were at war.  The Church attempted to discredit the Cathar belief by spreading stories that the heretics actually worshiped their evil deity in person.  Propagandists for the Church depicted Cathars kissing the anus of Satan in a ceremonial show of loyalty to him.  As a result of the Church's sustained attacks, the public's understanding of Satan moved from that of a mischievous spoiler to a deeply sinister force. 

*******************************

1273
  Thomas Aquinas argues that demons exist that try to lead people into temptation 

In Summa Theologian, a Dominican monk named Thomas Aquinas made his case for the existence of God.  In his work, much of which became adopted as the orthodoxy of the Church, Aquinas argued that the world was full of evil and dangerous demons.  Among other things, Aquinas argued, these demons had the habit of reaping the sperm of men and spreading it among women.  In Aquinas's mind, sex and witchcraft begin what will become a long association.  Demons thus are seen as not merely seeking their own pleasure, but intent also on leading men into temptation  

 

 

mid-1400s
5.  Witchcraft trials erupt in Europe 

Many adherents of Catharism, fleeing a papal inquisition launched against their alleged heresies, had migrated into Germany and the Savoy.  Torture inflicted on heretics suspected of magical pacts or demon-driven sexual misconduct led to alarming confessions.  Defendants admitted to flying on poles and animals to attend assemblies presided over by Satan appearing in the form of a goat or other animal.  Some defendants told investigators that they repeatedly kissed Satan's anus as a display of their loyalty.  Others admitted to casting spells on neighbors, having sex with animals, or causing storms.  The distinctive crime of witchcraft began to take shape. 

******************************

Pope Innocent VIII and Malleus Maleficarum

  Pope Innocent announced that satanists in Germany were meeting with demons, casting spells that destroyed crops, and aborting infants.  The pope asked two friars, Heinrich Kramer (a papal inquisitor of sorcerers from Innsbruck) and Jacob Sprenger, to publish a full report on the suspected witchcraft.  Two years later, the friars published Malleus maleficarum ("Hammer of Witches") which put to rest the old orthodoxy that witches were powerless in the face of God to a new orthodoxy that held Christians had an obligation to hunt down and kill them.  The Malleus told frightening tales of women who would have sex with any convenient demon, kill babies, and even steal penises.  (The friars asked, "What is to be thought of those witches who collect...as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members and eat oats and corn?")  Over the next forty years, theMalleus would be reprinted thirteen times and come to help define the crime of witchcraft.  Much of the book offered hints to judges and prosecutors, such as the authors' suggestion to strip each suspect completely and inspect the body to see whether a mole was present that might be a telltale sign of consort with demons, and to have the defendants brought into court backwards to minimize their opportunities to cast dangerous spells on officials. 

****************************

1591
8.  King James authorizes the torture of suspected witches in Scotland

Scotland's witch-hunting had its origins in the marriage of King James to Princess Anne of Denmark.  Anne's voyage to Scotland for the wedding  met with a bad storm, and she ended up taking refuge in Norway.  James traveled to Scandinavia and the wedding took place in at Kronborg Castle in Denmark.  After a long honeymoon in Denmark, the royal newlyweds encountered terrible seas on the return voyage, which the ship's captain blamed on witches.  When six Danish women confessed to having caused the storms that bedeviled King James, he began to take witchcraft seriously.  Back in Scotland, the paranoid James authorized torture of suspected witches.  Dozens of condemned witches in the North Berwick area were burned at the stake in what would be the largest witch-hunt in British history.  By 1597, James began to address some of the worst prosecutorial abuses, and witch-hunting abated somewhat 

************************************

1682
11. England executes its last witch

Lord Chief Justice Sir Francis North

In 1682, Temperance Lloyd, a senile woman from Bideford, became the last witch ever executed in England.  Lord Chief Justice Sir Francis North, a passionate critic of witchcraft trials, investigated the Lloyd case and denounced the prosecution as deeply flawed.  Sir Francis North wrote, "The evidence against them was very full and fanciful, but their own confessions exceeded it.  They appeared not only weary of their own lives but to have a great deal of skill to convict themselves."
North's criticism of the Lloyd case helped discourage additional prosecutions and witch-hunting shifted from one side of the Atlantic to the other, with the outbreak of hysteria in Salem in 1692.

The Enlightenment, beginning in the late 1680s, contributed to the end of witch-hunts throughout Europe.  The Enlightenment brought empirical reason, skepticism, and humanitarianism, each of which helped defeat the superstitions of the earlier age.  The Enlightenment suggested that there was no empirical evidence that alleged witches caused real harm, and taught that the use of torture to force confessions was inhumane.

******************************************

*****************

Cotton Mather, minister of the Old North Church in Boston, "found the study of witchcraft made to order for his neurotic and oversexed spirituality." Mather published in 1689 a bestselling book on the subject, Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, detailing an episode of supposed witchcraft a year earlier involving an Irish washerwoman named Goody Glover.  Mather's account, describing the symptoms of witchcraft, was widely read and discussed throughout Puritan New England. The book was in the meager library of Samuel Parris, the Salem minister in whose house began the tragic events of 1692.