It became the center of the witch hunt. For everyone and everything
Of course, the publication of The Hammer of the Witches did not have any immediate effect. The leader of the future hunt also did not come out of Heinrich Kramer himself: having given impetus to the beginning of events, he soon stepped aside. In recent years, Kramer was engaged in teaching and some administrative work, and then completely fell into oblivion: presumably, he died in 1505, but where and when exactly is unknown to historical science.
Medieval society, relatively inert, reacting to everything by no means with modern speeds, took a certain time. It can be conditionally said that a real fire broke out already closer to the middle of the 16th century. The development of the event was very uneven, and sometimes rather paradoxical tendencies were outlined in the "witch hunt".
The fire is spreading
As we already know, the very center of medieval Europe, the south of modern Germany, then the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, became the birthplace of the "witch hunt" in an organized form. There was someone here to continue Kramer's work. In addition, the flywheel of the Reformation was gradually accelerating: the old ways were collapsing, religious enmity began within the Christian world. All this contributed to witch hysteria.
witches coven
For example, in 1562, 67 women were executed in Wiesensteig. Already in this story, the typical details of such incidents are quite clearly manifested. In the previous few years, the city suffered seriously from epidemics and crop failures, and in early August 1562, a truly catastrophic hail hit the crops.
This was immediately declared to be the direct result of evil sorcery. Interestingly, it was by no means the inquisitor who acted as the accuser: the initiative to start the arrests came directly from the ruler of the city, Count Ulrich von Helfenstein.
Count von Helfenstein not only had no direct connection to the church: he even tossed between Catholicism and Lutheranism. Apparently, the feudal lord did not read the Hammer of the Witches either, but he used it, so to speak, a “pirated copy”: a certain book called “On the Tricks of Demons”, which came to Germany from France.
Initially, six women were convicted and executed in the Wiesensteig, but this was not enough. As a result, witchcraft processes were going on in the city until the beginning of next year. It seems that on this wave, someone decided to settle personal scores: there were testimonies about the connection of local witches with some witches from the city of Esslingen am Neckar. The citizens of Esslingen, however, turned out to be much more reasonable: after a short investigation, they released their suspects.
Witch water torture
In the view of a medieval inhabitant of Western Europe, witches were generally social beings who needed to communicate with each other, kept accountable to demons and had a strict hierarchy. Apparently, the Wienersteig was also of the opinion that, in general, the witches in the area were led by a certain queen, hexenkönigin, and there was no way to get to her. Sooner or later, the "chief witch" will form a new "junior witch staff", so it remains only to destroy it as it is discovered. Therefore, the processes in the unfortunate city over the next decades will be repeated more than once.
Following Germany and France, the "witch hunt" spread to neighboring countries. Germany will remain the absolute leader in terms of the number of trials and victims - however, given the vagueness of medieval statistics, we will not give exact figures now. However, one should not think that the Protestants seriously lagged behind the Catholics in this gloomy business.
To some extent, the situation was even reversed. Still, the Catholic Church is characterized by a fairly clear structure, hierarchy. Protestant churches have only just had time to form. In them, there was often less order, and more zeal. Anyone who listened to Kramer's ideas already wrote his own works on methods of combating witchcraft, established new rules for the investigation and trial.
Durer's witch, fragment
Often, the "normative acts" of secular and spiritual origin, directed against witchcraft, among the Protestants turned out to be even more severe than the Catholic ones.
In the field of persecution of witches, for example, Christian IV, king of Denmark and Norway in 1588-1648, was very noted. Despite the fact that Christian was a Lutheran, he warmly welcomed the "witch hunt", and it was carried out in the Protestant Danish kingdom with all ferocity.
The Danes themselves do not like to remember this very much, for whom Christian IV is one of the greatest leaders in the history of the country. Indeed, he did a lot for Denmark, but this does not negate the atrocities either. But the religious terror that was launched by order of the king is perfectly remembered by the Norwegians. A few years ago in Vardø, a town in the very north of the country (near the border with Russia), they even erected a monument to the victims of the “witch hunt” - the Steilneset Memorial. Under Christian IV, 91 people were executed here, and now less than 2,000 live. However, one can argue a lot about the circumstances and motives of this.
With all the horror and irrationality of what is happening, we must emphasize once again: if we rely on reliable sources, we will not see a large number of victims anywhere. Usually we are talking about several hundred people executed in a certain area during all the centuries of persecution of witchcraft. For example, an adequate estimate of the total number of victims of the "witch hunt" in Scotland, where it was very active, is about 4,000 people. This is a lot, but any outbreak of plague killed many more people.
Christian IV
Therefore, despite the nightmarishness of the events taking place, it is worth getting rid of the stereotype of irreparable damage to the European gene pool (colloquially, “they burned all the beautiful women”). Nothing like this, of course, happened: diseases, famine and wars killed incomparably more, even where the intensity of the fight against witchcraft was maximum.
"Witch Hunt" is terrifying precisely for its madness, not its scale. It's not about how many people were killed: what matters is which ones and why.
Typical witch hunt
If we try to make a typical picture of the beginning of the "witch hunt" in some particular territory, we will come to the conclusion that such does not exist. The process could start for various reasons. Sometimes an exalted fanatic like Kramer managed to launch it. In other cases, considerations of fighting witchcraft became just a cover for some kind of personal revenge or mercantile interests.
But the most common option can still be described. Most often, a large-scale persecution of witchcraft in a certain territory was preceded by certain disasters that hit it: crop failure, epidemics, war. Such events turned the already hard life of a medieval commoner into something completely unbearable.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that many authorities, such as Ulrich von Helfenstein mentioned above, preferred to blame witches: fires are still better than rebellion.
An illustrative case in the Scottish North Berwick, where the persecution of witches began in 1590 and continued for several years. All this was connected with the King of Scotland, James VI Stuart (he is also the King of England, James I).
As you know, Jacob was inclined to support the Protestants, which eventually resulted in the famous Gunpowder Plot - an attempt by Catholics to kill the monarch, the main character of which was Guy Fawkes. But before the failed terrorist attack, there were still 15 years left, but for now, Jacob decided to marry Princess Anna, the sister of the same Danish king Christian IV.
On the way back from Denmark, the ship suffered severe storms, for which the Danish witches were immediately blamed. The king really had a hard time on the road, because the expedition was not properly equipped and, apparently, the sailors did not quite cope with their duties. A scandal erupted. Initially, the process began in Denmark, where the unfortunate Anna Koldings turned out to be extreme: she was pointed out by Christopher Walkendof, one of the Danish ministers, who was initially asked uncomfortable questions.
Blaming the witches turned out to be the perfect solution for Walkendorf. Under torture, Anna Koldings slandered several more women, but the case did not end there. When King James found out about who was supposedly to blame for the inconveniences he experienced, he immediately ordered to organize trials in his homeland.
Events in North Breivik
James Stuart rightly believed that not everyone liked his religious views: if in England Henry VIII, who broke off relations with the Vatican, had long carried out the “Reformation from above”, then in Scotland there were enough Catholics. Perhaps he hoped to create a precedent for accusing those who did not like Protestantism of being connected with the Unclean. Or maybe he just threw a careless “this is how we would do it,” which those who wanted to curry favor with the monarch immediately rushed to fulfill it with all zeal.
The results were, of course, sad. But also very interesting - from the point of view of stereotypes about the "witch hunt".
The first accused in North Brevik were a noble woman, Agnes Sampson, and a teacher, John Fian. As you can see, firstly, it was no longer only about women - and then many more men will be convicted in North Brevik. Secondly, it was not some disenfranchised peasants who were accused, but people occupying a serious position in society. Now we can only guess if this happened by chance, or someone deftly settled scores with Sampson and Fian.
Both defendants were subjected to terrible torture, under which they confessed to everything, including attending the covens, the list of participants of which was gradually called - it's hard to say, under dictation or they themselves remembered the objectionable. The list also included both women and men, although the weaker sex prevailed. The complete list has not been preserved, but quite a few names are known. According to testimony during the trial, this was all a massive conspiracy to create a storm that would destroy the king.
Recall that the year was 1590 - far from the dark ages, untouched by enlightenment. America has long been discovered, the works of Copernicus have long been written, the Reformation has been going on for many years. And no Holy Inquisition had anything to do with it: Protestants acted, who once protested just against indulgences and other vices of the Catholic Church. A century has not passed since Martin Luther's "95 Theses" and the Leipzig Debate - but, alas, the evangelical approach led to the same sad results.
Many of the victims turned out to be completely random people. For example, the maid Gillis Duncan suffered because her nightly absences from home (probably to meet her lover or something like that) were considered attending covens. By the way, the lines from Shakespeare's "Macbeth", which are well known to many, refer precisely to these events: "purposely to be cassin into the sea to raise winds for destruction of ships".
Witches or sorcerers?
In fact, where Cramer's ideas were not directly guided, men were also often accused of witchcraft. This was especially characteristic of the Protestants, who, of course, were no longer so interested in the works of the Dominican. Let's say, you can remember the events at Pendle Hill, the "Lancashire Witches" of 1612: out of the eleven condemned, two were men.
The events at Pendle Hill are already a direct manifestation of the struggle of the Protestant Anglican Church against dissent in Britain. As you know, the head of the church in England was now the king himself - and the unwillingness to go to Anglicanism, in fact, was seen as a direct betrayal of the monarch.
In fairness, it should also be noted that people who were engaged in healing really suffered in Lancashire - thus, the accusations against them had at least some reasonable grounds in the eyes of a medieval person.
In the same 1612, the trial at Samlesbury took place, which modern English historians directly call an episode of "anti-Catholic propaganda." The bitter historical irony is that a little more than a century after the papal bull, Catholics began to be directly associated with sorcerers - and not somewhere in the wilderness, but in one of the most powerful and enlightened powers in Europe.
Anti-witch leaflet, Derneburg, 1555
One of the most famous witch trials in Germany is the persecution of witches in Würzburg, which lasted for several years during the Thirty Years' War. There is a detailed list of those executed, in which there are enough men: three innkeepers, three members of the city council, fourteen vicars, a certain Steinacher, a wealthy burgher, are mentioned. And also a number of boys 10-12 years old and just "suspicious men". This is not counting the many women of the most varied status, of course, including "the most beautiful girl in the city" (alas).
As for the question of male sorcerers in general, the attitude towards it in Europe was different. There is a demonological concept that denies the idea of the hexenkönigin, "witch queen", described above. According to this view, on the contrary, the link between demons and witches is always some male sorcerer. This is a completely natural idea for a patriarchal society, in which it was difficult for many to recognize the ability of women to organize themselves and establish some kind of administration of activity.
At this point, it is worth recalling the opinion of Olga Togoeva, a well-known Russian medievalist. Togoeva suggests that men were not just persecuted during the "witch hunt", but moreover: they made up the majority of those convicted. Of course, this thesis cannot be unambiguously proved because of the impossibility of compiling full-fledged statistics: even the overall estimate of the number of victims “walks” by a hundred or two thousand people in both directions, but it is necessary to take into account the opinion.
However, Togoeva does not focus specifically on the events that happened after the writing of The Hammer of the Witches. She rightly points out that demonology as a whole developed as an independent theological discipline much earlier, and even the activities of Thomas Aquinas (also, by the way, a monk of the Dominican Order) formed in the public mind the idea that witchcraft is, firstly, a reality, and second, crime. In this regard, she cites as an example the activities of the Roman Pontiff John XXII (he held the post in 1316-1334, long before the birth of Heinrich Kramer).
Under him, there were resonant trials in cases of witchcraft specifically against men: for example, in 1322, a real bishop was imprisoned on charges of witchcraft! After all, even the case of Gilles de Rais, the prototype of Bluebeard, was not without witchcraft motives.
Witches' Sabbath by Hans Baldung, fragment, 1514
What conclusion can we draw from this? The emphasis on the persecution of women, apparently, is really the personal merit of Heinrich Kramer and the book he wrote. And the degree to which it is followed in practice is a question of the attitude towards the "Hammer of the Witches" as a local leadership. In general, not only women were burned.
However, if we take the surviving documents on large-scale witch trials of the “witch hunt” era, that is, starting from the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, then we almost always clearly see the predominance of the weaker sex among the accused.
Having dealt with this issue, we must move on to the next topic that invariably pops up during the discussion of the "witch hunt". So far, the conversation has been about Europe, but what happened in Russia?
"For from time immemorial a demon has deceived a woman"
It is widely believed that there was no persecution of witches in Russia. Unfortunately, this is far from the case.
Of course, the scale of the problem in Russia was much smaller, and the reason for this is completely transparent: in Russian Orthodoxy, there was no such discipline as demonology at all. And without a scientific base, of course, it was difficult to organize systematic work to eradicate the phenomenon: why this is so, we have already seen on the example of Cramer. Nevertheless, both the church and the secular authorities in Russia were quite interested in finding and punishing witches.
In order to be convinced of this, it is enough to study the most important, well-known source about the life of Russia in the Middle Ages: The Tale of Bygone Years. In particular, it says the following: “Most of all, through wives, there are demonic sorcery, for from time immemorial the demon has deceived a woman, she is a man, therefore even today women are a lot of magic with sorcery, and poison, and other demonic intrigues.” As you can see, these are practically the same words that Kramer wrote in The Hammer of the Witches.
Fragment of "The Tale of Bygone Years", 15th century census
So, the Orthodox did not have demonology as a science, so there were no real scientific works systematizing the available information and setting out in detail the official theological position. This means that the Russians - from the peasant to the prince - were guided by certain folklore categories, as well as the opinion of the local clergy. The general folk ideas about witchcraft and witches in Russia, oddly enough, were extremely similar to European ones.
It is not so often that Russian legends and superstitions almost exactly repeat, for example, German ones. Compare the image of the dragon in Russia and in Britain. But the witch - she is a witch, throughout the Christian world.
What did this translate into in practice? Indeed, no single document, the “final solution to the witch question”, really appeared in Russia, but orders on the need to search for and punish witches are constantly traced both in church or monastery charters and in judicial records.
The punishment was not always as severe as in Europe. For example, the church charter of Yaroslav the Wise contains the following provision: “If the wife is a sorceress, a prisoner, or a sorcerer, or a greengrocer, the husband, having finished, will execute her, and not be deprived.” Here you need to understand the subtleties of the language: it means a certain punishment, in which the husband’s wife, however, will remain.
Yaroslav the Wise
Alas, this has not always been the case in practice. There are documents about the frequent burning of witches in Pskov, Novgorod and other cities of Russia - and, as in Europe, sometimes we are talking about a dozen or two witches at a time.
Notable people also suffered: for example, Karamzin cites information about the condemnation of the Mozhaisk noblewoman Marya Mamonova as a witch - she was burned. Marya was, by the way, the mother of one of the governors of Ivan III. In 1462, in Mozhaisk, the boyar Andrei Dmitrievich was executed on a similar charge. Unfortunately, there are many examples.
One important detail should be noted. Until about the 15th century, in such trials, it was more about accusations of paganism than of witchcraft itself: for example, Ardalion Popov (in his work “Judgment and punishment for crimes against faith and morality according to Russian law”) clearly shares these concepts, describing executions in 1024 in Suzdal, in 1071 in Novgorod and in the same place in 1227. Over time, "magic" and "witchcraft" were mixed into a single vice.
Finally, under Ivan the Terrible, in the Russian kingdom, in fact, its own “Hammer of the Witches” appeared. This book was called "The Tale of Magic" (note that the problem of paganism is no longer standing, and the term has somewhat changed its meaning), and carried exactly the same function as Cramer's work. Unfortunately, its author is unknown. But the text directly refers to the order of the king himself: “Command to write books and confirm, and cursed is sorcery, and in the scales of the commandment burn such fire.”
Ivan groznyj
Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich did not lag behind, who in 1648 ordered the Belgorod authorities regarding healers and sorcerers the following: "Such evil people and enemies of God are ordered to be burned in log cabins without any mercy, and their houses are ordered to be destroyed to the ground."
True, it was proposed to burn in a log house only those who were not enlightened by a set of softer measures that had been massively adopted earlier. These measures included corporal punishment and banishment from the city. The sovereign wished to achieve that in Belgorod “... henceforth, no ungodly deeds were held, and those renounced and heretical books, and letters, and conspiracies, and divination books, and roots, and poisons were burned, and they would not go to sorcerers and soothsayers and would not hold on to any witchcraft, and bones and other they didn’t tell fortunes and didn’t spoil people. ”
As in Europe, sorcerers of both sexes were persecuted in Russia. But, as in Europe, the documents more often show us the trials of women. Some researchers, however, believe that the surviving documentary sources do not reflect the real picture: allegedly, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in Russia, men still went more often. Is it really worth arguing about it? Hardly, especially since it is hardly possible to unambiguously establish the truth.
In fact, there is no doubt: if someone like Jakob Sprenger existed among our ancestors, the scale of repression would be about the same. In Russia, there were absolutely all the same prerequisites for a "witch hunt" as in Europe. The absence of a crisis of the Reformation was fully compensated by a long struggle with the remnants of paganism, the presence of non-Christians at hand, the same issue of the Old Believers.
The split of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century only added fuel to the fire of religious nervousness
Laws against witchcraft have not disappeared under the Romanovs. For example, under Peter I, the military regulations contained a completely unambiguous indication: execution by burning, “if he harmed someone with his sorcery, or really has an obligation with the devil.” Another question is that the bulk of the witch trials in Russia still happened in the 16th-17th centuries, as in Europe.
The burning of witches was practiced both in the usual form for Europe, and in more original ones. For example, they burned in a log house or on straw. In addition, sometimes the method of execution was different, since many Russian documents prescribing the execution of witches did not specify exactly how this should be done.
Another interesting point: there is a slight shift in the emphasis in the prosecution of witchcraft from questions of faith itself (a crime against the Lord) to the personality of the Sovereign. Reminds me of James I Stuart, doesn't it? In this regard, the witch trial that took place in Moscow in 1638-1639 is very indicative. It was about "attempts" to bring damage to the queen herself - a serious matter! It became doubly serious when it turned out that the suspects were connected with the Litvins. Again, it's hard not to see obvious parallels.
In a word, we have to state: there was still a “witch hunt” in Russia. Moreover, as well as in Europe, it is enshrined in normative acts at the highest level, and not at all in the form of rare episodes of lynching.
How many were injured? Alas, we will never know for sure. Researchers give figures for approximately 200-250 documented trials of cases of witchcraft on the territory of Russia. As mentioned above, often in this case it was not just one accused. The latest cases date back to the 18th century.
Of course, the Russian witch hunters did not reach the scale of what was happening in Britain, and especially in Germany, but the scale is quite comparable with other European countries. To say that there was no such phenomenon in our country is not only wrong, but also simply ignorant. After all, completely unambiguous information about the persecution of witchcraft is contained in those sources on medieval Russia with which any historian should be familiar.
There is no hell, except for what is nearby
The fact that the real causes of the "witch hunt" to a lesser extent lie precisely in the religious sphere is clearly indicated by one thing.
The Renaissance has passed. The Reformation won, and from 1648 it was pointless to talk about any real power in the hands of the church. Europe was rapidly enlightening: science was developing, society was acquiring more and more modern features, feudalism was becoming a thing of the past. The same Netherlands was already ruled by parliament, and not far off (by historical standards) was the Great French Revolution. It became more and more common not to believe in God at all, not to mention some intrigues of his opponent. But the witches still continued to burn.
This allows us to say that the “witch hunt” is more of a social phenomenon than a religious one. A lot has already been said above about the specific reasons that prompted the burning of imaginary witches. And in the final part of the article, in addition to summing up the results of the “witch hunt”, we will also talk about one striking case, the example of which clearly shows what is more important here: religion or social psychology in general.
December 19th, 2016
It was extremely easy to pass for a witch in the Middle Ages. All natural disasters and failures in business were attributed to the machinations of witches. And, it seems, an idea arose - the more witches to exterminate, the more happiness will be brought to all the remaining people.In December 1484, Pope Innocent VII issued the bull "Summis desiderantes affectibus", which marked the beginning of the witch hunt in Europe ...
Witchcraft as a crime
Magical exercises, collectively known as "witchcraft", arose at the dawn of mankind. In almost all early cultures, in one way or another, groups of people appeared who tried to influence the forces of nature through various rituals.
The attitude towards sorcerers often depended on the results of their activities, changing from adoration and reverence to hatred and the desire for physical violence.
With the advent of the first states, the authorities began to consider sorcerers as persons who, with their influence, could undermine the authority of the rulers.
Depiction of a witch, circa 1700, Germany
Even in the famous ancient laws of King Hammurabi, responsibility for witchcraft was provided:
« If a person has thrown an accusation of witchcraft against a person and has not proved it, then the one on whom the accusation of witchcraft has been thrown must go to the Deity of the River and plunge into the River; if the River seizes him, his accuser can take his house.
If the River cleanses this person and he remains unharmed, then the one who accused him of witchcraft must be killed, and the one who plunged into the River may take the house of his accuser.».
A person found guilty of witchcraft, in the presence of convincing evidence, was subject to the death penalty.
In ancient Rome, witchcraft was punishable depending on the degree of damage caused under the so-called talion law. If a person found guilty of injuring another by means of witchcraft could not compensate the victim, then he should have been inflicted with the same mutilation.
The infliction of death by witchcraft was likewise punishable by death.
The dangerous heresy of the Cathars
The fight against witchcraft reached a new level with the establishment of Christianity in Europe. In an effort to finally eradicate paganism, theologians declared the pagan gods to be demons and forbade any kind of communication with them, calling it idolatry. At first, however, idolatry threatened only with excommunication.
At the same time, Christian theologians of the 1st millennium were not inclined to exaggerate the capabilities of sorcerers. So, Bishop Burchard of Worms called on the holy fathers to expose the lie about the night flights of sorceresses, which they allegedly perform in the retinue of pagan gods.
At the beginning of the 2nd millennium, the church faced a new problem - the emergence of Christian sects that denied the dogmas of faith and opposed the power of the domination of the Roman high priests. The sect of the Cathars, or "Good Christians," as they called themselves, reached a particularly great influence.
The Cathars professed a neo-Manichean dualistic concept of two equal principles of the universe, good and evil, and the material world was considered as evil.
In the 13th century, in an effort to put an end to the growing influence of the Cathars, Pope Innocent III authorized the first ever crusade in Christian lands.
The Cathar, or Albigensian, crusade, which began in 1209, dragged on for 20 years and ended in the complete defeat of the Cathars.
However, the matter was not limited to this - the Roman Church granted a special church court, called the "Inquisition", broad powers to eradicate heresy, including by physically eliminating its carriers.
"Devil" as an argument
But the broad strata of the population did not understand the deep theological disputes between the various branches of Christianity. For many, it looked like this: at the behest of the Pope, some Christians exterminate others.
In order to get rid of such awkwardness, the Cathars were actively accused of witchcraft and connections with the devil. Under torture, heretics confessed to denying Christ, worshiping the forces of the devil, and those very night flights that theologians had called lies and delirium several centuries before.
Accordingly, now the situation for the broad masses looked like this: the church is fighting not with Christians, but with the intrigues of the devil and with those who, succumbing to his influence, have risen to the service of the enemy of mankind.
Such accusations turned out to be a very effective and efficient tool, and after the final destruction of the Cathars, they began to be actively used by the Inquisition against other enemies of the church.
Career of Inquisitor Kramer
Medieval Europe was an ideal place for the emergence of rumors about numerous witches and sorcerers. Regular crop failures, epidemics of deadly diseases, wars gave rise to panic and despair in the inhabitants of the Old World.
At the same time, the search for the culprit in both major and minor disasters was rather short-term - “ It's all about witches and wizards". Anyone who for some reason was unsympathetic to the accuser could be enlisted in this role. It was extremely difficult for a person accused of witchcraft to justify himself.
In the second half of the 15th century, a native of the free city of Schlettstadt, Heinrich Kramer, became widely known. Coming from a poor family, he joined the Dominican order and rose to the rank of inquisitor.
Kramer began his career as an inquisitor by investigating Trient, where a group of Jews were accused of ritually murdering a two-year-old boy. The outcome of the trial was the death sentence for nine defendants.
After this process, Inquisitor Kramer took up the fight against witches and sects. In Ravensburg, he held a trial in which two women were found guilty of witchcraft and burned at the stake.
Dad gives good
Kramer, however, believed that his capabilities were insufficient to deal with the minions of the devil. In 1484, he managed to convince Pope Innocent VIII to sanctify the fight against witches with his authority.
The bull Summis desiderantes affectibus ("With all the powers of the soul") is dated December 5, 1484. Officially recognizing the existence of witches, she gave full papal approval to the actions of the Inquisition with permission to use all necessary means for this. Attempts to prevent the actions of the Inquisition were punished by excommunication.
The original text of the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus. 1484
First of all, the bull referred to the Rhineland, where Heinrich Kramer and his associate, Inquisitor Jakob Sprenger, acted, but in fact it launched a great witch hunt in Europe.
Inquisitor Kramer, who received special powers, launched a real terror, the victims of which were dozens of "witches" and "sorcerers". Not everyone appreciated the zeal of the fighter against the devil - in 1485, a real uprising broke out against Kramer in Innsbruck, and the local authorities preferred to release all the women he had captured, and expel the inquisitor himself from the city.
"A hammer like a sword"
Wounded by such a turn of affairs, Cramer, who did not back down from his ideas, decided to set out his vision of the problem and ways to solve it in writing.
A treatise of 3 parts, 42 chapters and 35 questions was written in Latin in 1486 and first published in the city of Speyer in 1487. Heinrich Kramer's co-author was his colleague Jakob Sprenger.
The full title of this treatise is "The Hammer of the Witches, Destroying the Witches and Their Heresies, Like the Strongest Sword", but it is better known by the short title "The Hammer of the Witches".
Hammer of witches - a reference book of inquisitors, detailed instructions and guidance, telling in great detail about witchcraft, magic, witches, sorcerers and the fight against them, as well as heresy that penetrated into the souls of people at that time.
The first part outlined the church's point of view on the essence of witchcraft, where it was declared the worst of crimes and was mercilessly punished. It was believed that, in addition to harming people, another task of witches was to multiply evil spirits on Earth and create cursed places.
In addition, the authors cited the division of witches into various types and explained the basics of legal proceedings in their cases. In particular, it was emphasized that, taking into account the exceptional guilt of the accused, any witnesses, including excommunicated, convicted criminals, foreigners, and so on, are allowed to testify in such cases.
Sex, Women and Satan
The second, largest part of the Hammer, consisting of 26 chapters, is devoted to describing the theory of the existence and activities of witches, as well as ways to deal with them.
Among the various types of witchcraft, such as werewolf, sending diseases and controlling the elements, the largest place is given to sexual issues related to witches. The topics of sexual intercourse with demons and incubi, as well as the birth of children from the devil, love witchcraft over people and forcible seduction of them for sexual intercourse are analyzed in detail.
It was directly stated that sorcerers are much less common and pose less of a threat than women. The female gender was considered by the authors of The Hammer of the Witches as easy prey for the devil because of their initial instability in faith and a tendency to sin.
The third part of the treatise contains the formal rules for bringing legal action against a witch, securing her conviction and sentencing. It includes 35 questions and answers to them, which are designed to clarify all possible aspects of the witch trial.
The Hammer of the Witches very quickly turned into a kind of handbook for the inquisitors. Over the next 200 years, he withstood more than two dozen editions, turning into a real symbol of the witch hunt.
Burn with us, burn like us, burn more than us
Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, who signed the "Hammer of the Witches" with the Latin version of the name Henrikus Institor, stated that he personally sent 200 witches to the stake. But the works of the author himself were only the beginning of the madness that swept Europe.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, witch hunters sent hundreds and thousands of women to their deaths. The European Reformation not only did not change, but even worsened the situation, because in Protestant states the laws on witchcraft turned out to be much tougher than in Catholic ones.
Mass execution of witches in Scotland. 1659.
In the Saxon city of Quedlinburg, with a population of 12,000, 133 "witches" were burned in one day in 1589. In Silesia, a certain resourceful inquisitor came up with a special furnace for burning witches, where in 1651 alone he sent 42 people, including young children.
The paradox of the situation lies in the fact that people, dissatisfied with the dominance of the church, having forced out the Inquisition, did not abandon the persecution of sorcerers, but transferred this process into the hands of the secular authorities, after which the number of victims increased markedly.
People accused of witchcraft, out of fear and under torture, began to testify against their relatives, neighbors, casual acquaintances. The arrest of a 12-year-old "devil's servant" in the German city of Reutlingen led to the capture of 170 more "witches and sorcerers" based on his testimony.
“Three-four-year-old children were declared lovers of the Devil”
The picture of what is happening in the German city of Bonn at the beginning of the 17th century is captured in a letter from a certain priest addressed to Count Werner von Salm:
« It seems that half the city is involved: professors, students, pastors, canons, vicars and monks have already been arrested and burned ... The chancellor with his wife and the wife of his personal secretary have already been captured and executed. On the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, the ward of the prince-bishop, a nineteen-year-old girl, known for her piety and piety, was executed ...
TChildren from 3 to 4 years old were declared lovers of the Devil. They burned students and boys of noble birth 9-14 years old. In conclusion, I will say that things are in such a terrible state that no one knows with whom to speak and cooperate.».
Once a witch hunt began in a city or village, it could no longer stop. Both representatives of the lower strata and representatives of the nobility were dragged into the millstones of terror. In some places, it came to the complete extermination of women, and in other localities, the judges regretted that the process stopped due to ... lack of firewood.
The total number of victims of the witch hunt today is difficult to establish. The process was lengthy, sometimes fading and flaring up again in a period of serious social upheaval. Most often, modern researchers talk about 40,000 - 100,000 deaths as a result of witch hunts, although some believe that the victims could be much more.
European hysteria also affected the territory of the modern United States. The most famous witch-hunt in the New World was the Salem witch trials, which resulted in the hanging of 19 people, one death under torture, and about 200 more accused of witchcraft in prison.
Tompkins Harrison Mattson. The Court of Dorzhd Jacobs (Trial of the Salem Witches).
Only the fact that the accusations, based on the testimony of underage girls, were called into question, made it possible to stop further reprisals.
Only in the 18th century did the European rulers, by introducing new laws, manage to stop the witch hunt. The improvement of living conditions in Europe also contributed to this.
The last person to be executed in Europe for witchcraft is the Swiss Anna Geldi. The woman, under torture, confessed to practicing black magic, which, together with the charge of poisoning, became the reason for the death sentence.
The topic of witch-hunts raises many questions: Was there really an organized cult of devil's servants? What exactly were alleged witches accused of? What psychological mechanisms underlie the belief in witchcraft? How did the witch trials start and why did the witch trials suddenly stop?
November 3, 1324 in Kilkenny, Ireland, was excommunicated and burned alive by Petronilla de Meats - a servant of a wealthy lady Alice Keiteler. This execution ended the persecution of Alice Kaiteler by the Bishop of Ossor, Richard de Ledrede, who at the beginning of 1324 brought several accusations against her at once: in renunciation of the Lord and the Catholic Church; in an attempt to know the future through demons; in connection with the "demon of one of the lower classes of hell" and the sacrifice of living roosters to him; in the manufacture of magical powders and ointments, with the help of which she allegedly killed three of her husbands and was going to do the same with the fourth.
Lady Alice was powerful enough to oppose the bishop, but she still had to move to England. Then the "scapegoat" in this story was her maid. And although, under the flogging, Petronilla de Mits confessed to everything that the bishop wanted to hear: attending night orgies, making sacrifices to the demon, and also that her mistress was the most skilled of witches, this did not save the unfortunate.
This story was one of the first in the infamous witch hunt, which lasted several centuries and claimed the lives of, according to various estimates, from 60 to 100 thousand people. True, in the XIV century the wheel was only spinning and executions were relatively rare. The "Great Hunt" began in the middle of the 16th century and lasted for about 200 years - this period accounts for about 100,000 processes and 50,000 victims. The witch hysteria reached its peak in the German states, Switzerland, France and Scotland, to a lesser extent affecting England, Italy and Spain, and almost did not touch Eastern Europe and Russia. Only a few processes took place in America, the most famous example being the Salem events of 1692-1693.
Witch-hunting is perceived by many as a symbol of the "gloomy Middle Ages", but, as we can see, its peak does not fall at all on the "silent centuries", but at the beginning of a new time - in the 17th and even 18th centuries. It seems incomprehensible, but people were burned at the time of Newton and Descartes, Kant and Mozart, Schiller and Goethe! Hundreds of thousands of "witches" went to the stake in the age of scientific revolution, and among the judges were university professors. Until recently, historical science knew very little about the witch hunt, even the number of victims of this ideological plague was not known. Only in recent decades, thanks to the systematic painstaking processing of court documents, monastic and municipal archives, has it been possible to recreate an approximate picture of events.
How it all began
There are several versions regarding the emergence of mass witch processes, none of which, however, can be considered exhaustive. According to one version, the witch hunt was just a continuation of the practice of eradicating heresies. Supporters of this point of view argue that the Inquisition perceived witches as members of an organized satanic sect, and attribute the beginning of their hunting to the 12th century, when information about the Cathar sect appears. The 11th-12th centuries, as you know, were the heyday of the heretical movements of the Bogomils, Albigensians and Waldensians, and the Catholic Church reacted to this by creating in 1215 a special body - the papal inquisition - to search for and punish heretics. However, the Inquisition did not at all set as its goal the destruction of witches. She prosecuted those suspected of witchcraft only if they were involved in a heretical movement. At the same time, the percentage of acquittals was very high.
In accordance with another point of view, witches were persecuted as a kind of phantom "internal enemy" along with other outcasts, primarily Jews and lepers. Indeed, as early as the 11th century, the first ghettos for Jews appeared in Germany and their massacres began in Spain. In 1179, France passed a law against lepers and homosexuals. At the end of the 12th century, Jews were expelled from France. And, finally, in the XIV century in the same country there are massacres of lepers. But such comparative retrospectives do not clarify the causes of the mass witch hunt, which unfolded much later than the events listed.
There is also a psychoanalytic interpretation of witchcraft processes, according to which they were a mass misogony - a war of men against women. This version was put forward by the French historian Jules Michelet, who published the book The Witch and the Woman in 1929. This original interpretation still inspires the ideologists of the feminist movement. But to assert that the witch trials were a "women's holocaust" is hampered by two historical facts - among those convicted of witchcraft there were about a third of men (and in Normandy and Scandinavia even the overwhelming majority), and it was women who very often acted as accusers.
According to the most curious of the versions, the witch hunt was the result of a mass psychosis caused by stress, epidemics, wars, famine, as well as more specific reasons, among which poisoning with ergot (a mold that appears on rye in rainy years) or atropines is most often mentioned ( belladonna and other plant and animal poisons). However, the duration of the era of the persecution of witches and the obvious bureaucracy, even the routine of processes, prevent us from accepting this version. In addition, then it will be necessary to admit that it was not the peasants, exhausted by hunger and stress, but the learned demonologists and judges who suffered from a disorder of consciousness: historians have proved that the stories about flights to the Sabbath and other incredible things, allegedly caused by hallucinations, were not the imagination of the accused, but only answers to direct questions from interrogators who sought, through torture, to confirm their own ideas about what and how witches should do.
Finally, according to one of the most convincing explanations, the spread of witch hysteria was facilitated by the appearance of demonological scholarly treatises - instructions for finding and eradicating witches. They were based on the authority of the Old Testament: "Do not let the soothsayers live," says the book of Exodus (22:18). One of the most influential manuals of this kind - the famous "Hammer of the Witches" by the Dominican monks Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Institoris - was published in 1487 on behalf of Pope Innocent VIII. In the next 200 years, this treatise went through 29 editions and was used to formalize judicial interrogations. In the 16th - early 17th centuries, many publications of this kind appeared - "Demonomania" by Jean Bodin, "Demonology" by King James I Stuart, "Demonolatry" by Nicolas Remy. The tone of these works betrays a deep inner tension, which found expression in the construction of a nightmarish universe where diabolical forces rage and indulge in revelry. From the treatises of scientific demonologists, the image of a devilish servant - a witch - gradually penetrated into the hearts and minds of the reading public.
The image of a witch
When the word "witch" is used, they usually represent an ugly old woman (who, however, can appear as a beautiful woman) with unkempt hair, sparse teeth and a piercing gaze, surrounded by cats and other small living creatures. With the help of evil spirits, she harms her neighbors, sends illness and death to people, takes milk from cows, causes bad weather, drought and pestilence, brews potions, turns into various animals and objects, flies at night on a broomstick or a goat to the witches' coven - satanic orgies. This image goes back partly to European folklore, partly to the work of demonologists at the beginning of modern times. Many paintings and engravings of the 16th-18th centuries (from Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Albrecht Dürer to Francisco Goya) depict the same plot: naked women, young and old, surrounded by magical books, skulls, snakes and toads, boil their disgusting potion or on goats, dogs and grips fly to the night gathering.
The image of a witch in the works of theologians of the 15th-17th centuries was formed on the basis of the ancient heritage - in the image of the insidious libertine, the features of the Old Testament Lilith, the ancient goddess Diana, Circe, who turned the companions of Odysseus, Medea and the female characters of the poems of Virgil and Horace into pigs, are guessed. Adding to this image was a new interpretation of the unusual abilities of the witch. The idea that some people have supernatural abilities is universal to all the peoples of the Earth. But in Europe of the late Middle Ages, these abilities became associated with the devil - it was believed that the witch acquired her skills in exchange for an immortal soul. As a result, a "devil's mark" allegedly appeared on the witch's body - an inconspicuous speck, insensitive to pain. The search for this speck has become one of the standard investigative actions during the witch trial. Another "test" was a water test - it was assumed that the witch, even with her hands tied, did not drown, because her household demons and the patron himself helped her. Perseverance during interrogations, unwillingness to confess to atrocities were also considered indicators of her inhuman nature.
In the eyes of European peasants, the image of a witch was somewhat different - it was not necessarily a woman, the main thing was not gender, but the appearance and behavior of a person. Handicapped, lonely, unsociable, angry and quarrelsome, disregarding moral standards or suddenly rich - these are the ones who risked getting a reputation as a witch or sorcerer. They got along with them and even tried to treat them as politely as possible so as not to incur their wrath. But as soon as something happened, the witch was threatened, forced to take back the damage, even beaten and scratched to the point of blood (it was believed that this could remove the spell). Not a connection with the devil, not night flights, but the harmful actions of a witch, witchcraft damage - the so-called maleficia - frightened the peasants.
Contrary to a common stereotype, the image of a witch as a secret enemy dangerous to the whole society is more typical not for Catholic, but for Protestant communities with their struggle for ideological purity and categorical rejection of everything even remotely resembling magic. The Catholic Church was more relaxed about the village healers, she put up with the existence of the devil and his servants, thus adapting pre-Christian ideas. There was a lot of magic in Catholicism itself, the clergy and monasteries offered parishioners and pilgrims various means for miraculous healings and protection from witches. The Reformation abolished both these means and the world in relation to all dissenters, whether papists or witches. The Inquisition sentenced witches to be burned not for magic, but for heresy - an agreement with the devil and serving him, while the Protestants were much more radical.
Was there anything similar in Orthodoxy? American researcher Valerie Kivelson believes that witch hysteria did not touch Russia, largely because of the special attitude to the human body in Eastern Christianity, in contrast to Catholicism and even more so Protestantism. Although Orthodoxy inherited the Judeo-Christian concept of woman as the vessel of sin, it did not accept the fall of Adam and original sin as the basis of Christian teaching. The consequences were enormous: if for Catholicism the sins of the flesh are the main vice and the reason for the fall of a man, and Protestantism treats the flesh as an inert "bearer" of the soul, then in Orthodoxy the flesh is perceived not as an inevitable evil, but rather as a blessing sanctified by the incarnation of the Savior. Eastern theologians were less absorbed in the idea of the sinfulness of the flesh than their Western counterparts, and, accordingly, the woman as a bodily being disturbed and frightened Orthodox Christians less. There was no theological theory of witchcraft in Russia, and it was not painted in sexual tones. In the course of Russian witchcraft trials, the devil, this patron of Western witches, was very rarely discussed.
It is also important that in Russia the criminal legislation regarding witchcraft in the pre-Petrine era was not developed, and Peter I, by his decree of 1715 against the hysterics, the usual accusers of sorcerers, once and for all blocked the channel of denunciations. Orthodox priests were careful in their sermons on the topic of witchcraft and corruption, in which Russian peasants and townspeople undoubtedly believed, and sought to prevent popular lynching of sorcerers. In addition, Orthodoxy did not experience the deep crisis that resulted in the Reformation in the West and led to a protracted era of religious wars.
France was one of the first countries where witch-hunts began already in the first half of the 14th century, under Pope John XXII. In 1390, the first secular trial took place on charges of witchcraft. From the beginning of the 16th century, the courts became massive, and in the period 1580-1620 there was a real epidemic of witchcraft hysteria. In the middle of the 17th century, the Parliament of Paris began to reject cases of witchcraft, but the last witch's fire in the French capital burned just shortly before the guillotines of the bourgeois revolution of the late 18th century.
The Spanish Inquisition actively fought against heretics, but Spain suffered less from the witch hunt than other European countries. The punishments of the court of the Inquisition were even lighter than those of the secular courts! The first execution of a witch in this country dates back to 1498, and the last punishments for witchcraft (two hundred lashes and a 6-year exile) date back to 1820. In England, a law against witchcraft was passed in 1542, and torture was prohibited, and witches were executed by hanging. After 1682, witches were no longer executed, the last official charge of witchcraft dates back to 1712, and in 1736, for the first time in Europe, the corresponding article of the law was repealed. About a thousand inhabitants of England became victims of the witch hunt. In Germany, the epicenter of witch panic, this hunt claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people.
The laws against witchcraft, which were part of the Caroline Code of 1532, provided for torture and the death penalty, and the most common method of execution was burning alive. Mass trials began here in the second half of the 16th century, under the influence of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, and the last sentence for witchcraft was pronounced in 1775. Scotland was second only to Germany in the cruelty of witch trials. Starting rather late, at the end of the 16th century, hunting for them became especially intense from the time of the reign of King James VI Stuart (in 1603 he became king of England under the name of James I). The greatest waves of persecution occurred in the years 1640-1644 and 1660-1663. The last witch in Europe was executed in 1782 in Switzerland.
snowball effect
Changes in legislation played an important role in the transformation of individual processes into mass ones - under the influence of the papal bulls of the XIV-XV centuries, descriptions of the investigative methods of the Inquisition and articles on punishment for witchcraft fall into secular criminal and judicial codes. Witchcraft was recognized as an exceptional crime - crimen exeptum. This meant unlimited use of torture, as well as the fact that denunciations and testimonies of witnesses were enough to pass a sentence. Torture gave rise to the "snowball" effect - the accused betrayed more and more accomplices, whom they allegedly met at the Sabbaths, and the number of convicts grew exponentially. So, for example, in Salem, a small town in which there were only a hundred households, 185 people were convicted in two years of trials.
Witchcraft processes were especially intense in the territories affected by the Reformation. Having perceived the demonological constructions of their political opponents as a dogma, the Protestant mentors began to fight the "messengers of hell" on their own. "Sorcerers and witches," wrote Martin Luther, "the essence of evil devilish offspring, they steal milk, bring bad weather, send damage to people, take away strength in the legs, torture children in the cradle ... force people to love and copulate, and there is no number the machinations of the devil." And soon Lutheran and Calvinist states had their own, more severe laws on witchcraft (for example, the review of court cases was canceled). In an attempt to disenchant the world, Protestant theologians have created mass paranoia.
So, in the Saxon city of Quedlinburg with a population of 12 thousand people, 133 "witches" were burned on just one day in 1589. In Silesia, one of the executioners designed a furnace in which in 1651 he burned 42 people, including two-year-old children. But even in the Catholic lands of Germany, the witch-hunt was no less cruel at that time, especially in Trier, Bamberg, Mainz and Würzburg.
The free city of Cologne remembers the witches' panic of 1627-1639, when about a thousand people were killed. In Tettwang (Württemberg) in 1608, the venerable father of the family died in prison from torture, his wife was tortured 11 times until she confessed. And their 12-year-old daughter was tortured with such cruelty for a whole day that the executioner himself only after ten weeks decided that she had recovered enough to withstand further torture.
Duren, a priest from Alfter, in a letter to Count Werner von Salm, described witch persecution in Bonn at the beginning of the 17th century: “It seems that half the city is involved: professors, students, pastors, canons, vicars and monks have already been arrested and burned ... The Chancellor and his wife and the wife of his personal secretary have already been captured and executed. On the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, the ward of the prince-bishop, a nineteen-year-old girl known for her piety and piety, was executed ... Three or four-year-old children were declared lovers of the Devil. Students and boys of noble birth 9-14 years old were burned. In conclusion, I will say that things are in such a terrible state that no one knows with whom to speak and cooperate."
Witch persecution in Germany culminated during the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, when warring parties accused each other of witchcraft heresy. But even in times of peace, political struggles and court intrigues often took the form of mutual accusations of witchcraft. In England, many high-ranking officials were convicted of this crime, suspected of political dissent and a secret conspiracy against the king. In 1478, the Duchess of Bedford was accused of witchcraft. Richard III in 1483 accused the former Queen Elizabeth Woodville of withering his hand. Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII, was executed in 1536 on charges of witchcraft.
There was another reason that the trials became widespread - the transfer of cases of witchcraft from church courts to secular ones made hunting directly dependent on the moods and ambitions of local rulers. And if some of them did not allow rampant trials, then others encouraged them in every possible way and even acted among the zealous witch hunters themselves. The epicenter of mass witchcraft processes was either in the remote provinces of large states, or where the central government was weak. In centralized states with a developed administrative structure, such as France, witch-hunts were less intense than in states that were weak and fragmented. Sometimes the central government itself started the processes, as in Spain, but they could never have reached such a scale without the support of the local elite.
However, political factors in themselves would hardly have played a decisive role if it were not for the concomitant circumstances. Witch trials spread in waves closely associated with crisis phenomena - crop failures, wars, plague and syphilis epidemics, which gave rise to despair and panic and increased the tendency of people to look for the secret cause of misfortunes. According to historians, at the end of the 16th century, the number of trials increased sharply due to the demographic and economic crises. The increase in population and long-term deterioration of the climate during this century, along with the influx of silver from the American colonies, led to a price revolution, famine, and rising social tensions.
Psychologists say that in a situation of stress, economic instability, social and ideological crisis, the so-called archaic syndrome can occur - an intellectual regression when a person or society finds themselves in a strange world of revived ghosts and materialized phobias. Fear lulls the mind, and the sleep of the mind, in the words of Goya, gives birth to monsters. In such a situation, the natural way to eliminate fear and panic is to generate the image of an "internal enemy" in order to expel it, symbolically expel the cause of fear.
Where does the belief in witchcraft come from?
There are few people on Earth who are convinced that the events that happen to them personally are random. Trying to understand the reasons for what happened, a person is rarely satisfied with the obvious and looks for its secret springs. Even the most ordinary event, in which, it would seem, it is difficult to see mysticism, calls for comprehension. A man stumbled on a step and broke, for example, his nose - why me? Why now? What is it for? Ways of understanding can be very different - it depends both on cultural tradition and on individual fantasy: a child will hit an object that offended him in revenge, a hippie will think about an "astral attack", and Apollinaria Mikhailovna will remember her neighbor - you see, she jinxed, envied new shoes.
The idea that the mystical cause of misfortune may be the resentment or envy of a fellow tribesman is characteristic of all human societies, with the possible exception of the Pygmies in the rainforests of Africa and some other groups of hunter-gatherers who lead a similar semi-nomadic lifestyle - they live in too small groups. to afford intra-group animosity and suspicion of witchcraft. Their mythology is humane - misfortunes are attributed to evil spirits or the souls of ancestors. As soon as a conflict arises, the pygmy can leave the group and join another. In addition, they periodically conduct special trance rituals of "exorcising evil." Apparently, the pygmies would have subscribed to Sartre's well-known expression "hell is within us." In larger but still smaller communities, where competition, envy, and strife are not mitigated by simple survivalism and humane mythology, evil is often personified by a member of the community—not like everyone else, too weak or too strong. Here, too, there are rituals for the expulsion of evil, but not from the human body, but from the social body - the expulsion of the "scapegoat" from the community. This so-called "basic" sorcery has been found in abundance by anthropologists in the tribal societies of Africa and Asia. It is based on the psychological mechanism of transferring responsibility or guilt to another person and projecting one's own hostile feelings onto him.
When there are no state institutions, such ideas and practices turn out to be a means of public administration, they perform important functions - social control, assertion of moral values, group cohesion, and punishment of violators. Thinking and acting in terms of witchcraft is a way of dealing with adversity: accusations crystallize and thereby ease many anxieties and doubts, and the expulsion of personified evil resolves conflict, establishes boundaries and internal cohesion of the community. Anthropologists believe that from this point of view, witchcraft representations are a perfectly rational strategy for solving problems. With its help, misfortune can be explained otherwise than by chance or one's own mistake. The threat of accusations of witchcraft keeps potential troublemakers under control, makes you protect your reputation, do not talk too much, do not violate social norms, and does not allow you to become too rich at the expense of your neighbors. The fear of witchcraft even plays a useful role - it makes you be more careful and attentive with the elderly, beggars, neighbors.
However, the anthropological theory of witchcraft is not well suited to explain the official witchcraft processes in Christian Europe - here they were not a social institution that performed important functions, but rather an indicator of the breakdown of the social system.
Ideological confusion
It took about 100 years for scholarly speculation about witchcraft and witches to result in mass persecution in Europe. More than one generation of nobles grew up surrounded by books and engravings, rumors and opinions about the enemies of the human race, omnipresent like flies. And by the middle of the 16th century, a sufficient number of zealous hunters from secular youth appeared, convinced of the serious danger of witches to society.
In the view of the peasants, the witches were not connected with each other, therefore, for example, the harm caused by one could be corrected by the other. Demonologists, and after them the practicing hunters, took the next logical step: since witches are the enemies of society, it means that they constitute something like an anti-society, a secret organization weaving a cunning diabolical conspiracy. Therefore, each of them is doubly dangerous, and one cannot get along with them, nor pardon them. Apparently, it was the overlap of folk and scholarly traditions that led to the fact that the witch began to be perceived not as a person, but, like an alien creature from science fiction films, as Something that was placed in a human shell. And the more familiar and close this person was, the more horror and disgust he caused after he was "replaced". In a world where a person is more of a soul than a body, a pact with the devil leads to the appearance of people of a hostile nature in human form. Flights to the sabbath, werewolf and other unusual abilities of witches emphasize this inhuman nature of them. All secret fears and suppressed desires, incompatible ideas leading to a bifurcation of the image of a loved one, were reflected in this nightmarish fantasy. Confessions under torture, answers to sophisticated questions of the inquisitors only confirmed this vision. The execution of the witch was not a human death for the executioners and most of the mouthers, it was the liberation of the world from yet another enemy.
This idea gradually penetrated into the previously closed world of the rural community. When ecclesiastical and secular authorities became interested in witches, they only strengthened the faith of commoners in witchcraft with their authority and also provided them with the opportunity to get rid of dangerous or annoying neighbors without dirtying their own hands. Conflicts began to take on a different form - not counter-magic and lynching, but denunciations to the authorities. Historians are now shocked as they parse these anonymous notes scrawled in clumsy handwriting. In 1692, in Salem, 4-year-old Dorcas Goode, the daughter of one of those convicted of witchcraft, was sent to Boston prison for nine months. Would the inhabitants of Salem, respectable Puritans, themselves, without relying on the authority of judges, dare to harm a child?
Through the efforts of the elite, popular culture was open to external influences and turned out to be fertile ground for the materialization of book demons. This both generated and justified the processes. A kind of "focus", in which peasant superstitions and scientific theories converged, were some local nobles, "generals" of the witch hunt.
Salem, a small town in Massachusetts in New England (now the United States), witch panic swept in 1692-1693 at the time of the crisis of political and judicial power. A group of teenage girls who had gathered in the evenings to listen to the tales of the slave Tituba and wonder about the suitors suddenly began to behave strangely (they were easily excited and hysterical), which was interpreted by the pastor and doctor as demon possession (in that era it was a common explanation for nervous diseases).
The girls took advantage of the opinions of adults and began to play possessed, writhing and struggling in fits during sermons, shouting out the names of the people who allegedly bewitched them. The first victims were Tituba herself and some of the lonely and poor women of Salem. Then it was the turn of the others. The thoughtless pranks of teenagers were joined by the voices of some adults who began to accuse their enemies of witchcraft damage. A total of 185 people were arrested during this hysteria. Thirty-one people were sentenced to death, nineteen (including five men) were hanged.
Of the remaining twelve, two died in prison: one was tortured to death, the other (Tituba) was kept in prison for life without a sentence. Two convicts had their execution suspended due to pregnancy, and they lived for quite a long time. One woman escaped from prison after the verdict, and five repented and secured leniency. 14 years later, one of the accusers, Anna Putnam, took back her testimony, saying that she and other girls were responsible for the deaths. In 1711, the State Supreme Court passed an order for the rehabilitation of the condemned.
Witch hunters
According to one of the historians, the witch hunt did not affect Russia because it "did not have its own Matthew Hopkins." This rural gentleman from East England decided in 1645 that a group of peasant women near his house were going to perform witch rituals, about which he knew a lot from literature and painting. So he realized that he had the ability to identify witches. Proclaiming himself a general in the hunt for them, he, along with his partner John Stern, began pursuit in north Essex, and then in other counties. Pretty soon experts began to receive invitations from the villages asking for help to get rid of the enemies of Christianity. They came to the village, asked about conflicts and suspicions, subjected the suspects to torture - deprived them of food and sleep for several days, determined the presence of devilish spots with needles, carefully watched if a demon appeared in the room where the suspect was bound, in the form of an animal or insect. A real witch's panic began. In total, 250 people were convicted in this area over 300 years, of which 200, mostly women, were convicted in the second half of 1645.
Hopkins immediately declared every illness, accident or incident a witchcraft corruption; he argued that witches don't just exist, they are literally everywhere. He declared every old woman with a wrinkled face, with a spindle in her hands, a witch. Whether Hopkins had selfish interests at the beginning of his enterprise is hard to say, but subsequently his "help" to the villagers was generously paid for by them. Such arbitrariness became possible due to a number of circumstances: the civil war destroyed the judicial and administrative bodies, and to top it all off, there was neither a landlord nor a parish priest in Munningtree, Hopkins' hometown.
Soon, unauthorized hunting attracted the attention of John Gole, vicar of a nearby town. The vicar, of course, did not deny the existence of witches, but argued that they were not so easy to detect, and strict identification procedures should be applied, and certainly if the reason was serious, and not just a chicken died. In sermons, Gole spoke of the inadmissibility of arbitrariness, called Hopkins to him, but he only politely answered letters, without stopping his activities. However, a year later, Hopkins died of tuberculosis, and after 14 months of intense hunting, she completely stopped. However, it would be too easy to assume that by getting rid of all the "hunters", you can stop the witch hunt.
Why did the processes stop?
It is also impossible to answer this question unambiguously. Here, as in the case of the witch-hunt, a whole complex of reasons was at work. Usually they refer to the ideology of the Enlightenment, the rise of science and the triumph of reason, but at the same time they forget that not only obscurantists accused scientists of having connections with demons, but scientists themselves were often fond of magic. Nameless market traders and university professors were burned for witchcraft.
In fact, both nobles and theologians themselves began to speak out against the witch hunt quite early, only their voices were not heard for a long time. In 1584, the Kentish nobleman Reginald Scott published at his own expense "The Discovery of Witchcraft" - the most important English treatise that denies the power of the devil and the reality of witches. The Jesuit Friedrich von Spee, in his famous work "A Warning to the Judges, or on Witch Trials" (1631), sharply opposed this madness. First of all, he argued, it is necessary to abolish the terrible torture and then the witches will disappear by themselves. The Protestant preacher Balthazar Becker in his book "The Bewitched World" (1691) severely condemned fellow believers for inciting witch hysteria. The Prussian jurist and philosopher Christian Tomasius in his essay "Short Theses on the Sin of Witchcraft" (1704) argued the absurdity of witch trials. The authority of Thomasius was extremely high at the court of the Prussian king, and two years later Frederick I reduced the number of witch trials, but only by the middle of the 18th century bonfires ceased to blaze in Prussia.
The change in the social portrait of the witch also led to the end of the hunt. If the first "scapegoats" were the weak and crippled, old beggars and poor maids, then with the growth of witch panic, informers no longer considered either the social status, or the sex and age of the accused. Death sentences for witchcraft began to be issued to school teachers, ladies of impeccable reputation, pastors, babies of noble blood, and even members of the families of judges. It is not surprising that in such a situation, the skepticism of the judges grew, they were less zealous in their mission and argued that it was difficult to determine a real witch. Eventually, in educated circles, it became unfashionable and even indecent to believe all this nonsense about witches.
There were other factors that contributed to the decrease in belief in witchcraft among the common people. Gradually, medical care and social security improved, with the development of medical knowledge, the idea of \u200b\u200bpsychic illness appeared and the former possessed and "spoiled" began to be locked up in lunatic asylums. The growth of industry led to the outflow of rural residents to the cities, which reduced social tension in the countryside. In cities, with population growth, a different type of relationship began to dominate - more individualism and independence, a smaller role of reputation than in a small community where everyone knows everything about everyone and depends on each other. However, in reality, the witch hunt did not stop immediately after changes in legislation and living conditions.
Lynching after the hunt
After the end of the organized and legally formalized witch trials, only the then human rights activists could breathe freely. But witch-hunts continued in rural and urban communities. Respectable citizens still had beer wort sour, children got sick and chickens died. Having lost the opportunity to denounce harmful neighbors, citizens began to solve the problem by the old means - through lynchings and lynchings.
April 22, 1751 in Tring (England) Ruth Osborne, 70 years old, and her husband were torn to pieces by a crowd of townspeople. The elderly and poor Osborne couple had a reputation as sorcerers. If there was any misfortune, they were usually blamed. Farmer Butterfield was especially affected by them: once he refused to give Ruth milk, and soon his cows began to die. Butterfield sold the farm and opened a tavern, but things weren't going well, and besides, he himself fell ill with a nervous illness. Butterfield turned to a fortuneteller, and she confirmed his suspicions that this was a corruption. Word quickly spread around the area, and on April 22, the crowd began to look for the Osbournes, who were hidden by local authorities for safety. Finding the house where they were hiding, the townspeople broke the windows and even searched the salt box, believing that it would not be difficult for the sorcerer to turn into something small, like a cat. In the end, the authorities were forced to extradite the Osbornes, and the crowd, led by the chimney sweep Thomas Colley, dealt with the "sorcerers". At a jury trial, Colley was found guilty of premeditated murder and hanged.
The witch hunt, which claimed the lives of thousands of people, is such a prominent page in European history that, it would seem, it is difficult to ignore it. However, the prosperous XIX century forgot about it. It was rediscovered by historians only in the first decades of the 20th century. Since then, hundreds of scientific studies on witchcraft and demonology have been written, not only in Europe, but also in various parts of the world. The Nazi persecution of non-Aryans, Stalin's search for "enemies of the people", and the McCarthyist persecution of communists in post-war America have come to be referred to as "witch hunts", and in recent months this expression has often been found in newspapers in connection with the war in Iraq. All these very different political phenomena are united by a common idea of some dangerous and strong beings, often with something diabolical inside (whether it be demons, genes or ideas), who want to destroy a "respectable society". These images are fabricated by the elite, and they enter the imagination of the people, and live until the elite, seeing the devastating consequences of the persecution of a phantom enemy, proclaims a stop to the hunt, or some external force does, as in the case of Nazi Germany.
As a rule, such terror begins during periods of ideological breaks and economic upheavals.
On the one hand - witches, Jews, Freemasons, Democrats, oligarchs, on the other - the rural gentleman Matthew Hopkins, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Apollinaria Mikhailovna ... In the words of the English historian Robin Briggs, a witch is always someone else, but faith in witchcraft is in ourselves.
If a person has thrown an accusation of witchcraft against a person and has not proved it, then the one on whom the accusation of witchcraft has been thrown must go to the Deity of the River and plunge into the River; if the River seizes him, his accuser can take his house. If the River cleanses this man and he remains unharmed, then the one who threw the accusation of witchcraft against him must be killed, and the one who plunged into the River may take the house of his accuser.
XV-XVII centuries in Western Europe[ | ]
Despite the fact that the mention of witches and sorcerers was contained in early Christian treatises, until the 13th century, belief in witchcraft was considered a “pagan superstition” and, in some cases, was punished, for example, by church repentance. Even in cases where witchcraft figured in court cases, medieval civil law was interested exclusively in provable acts of infliction of damage, in which witchcraft turned out to be an almost accidental component - the action, but not the intention, was subject to punishment. Expanded concepts about demonic forces and the people whom these forces seduced began to appear only in the era of the "High Middle Ages". According to the German historian the persecution of witches and sorcerers was theoretically prepared by medieval scholasticism and transferred to the practical plane by the church inquisition. Thus, scholastic demonology grew out of medieval theology, which was engaged in the scientific study of heresies, since various groups of heretics were often accused of having links with the devil. Thus, the work of Thomas Aquinas played a significant role in the development of demonology.
According to the calculations of historians, the persecution of witches arose in the 30-40s of the XV century in the western Alpine regions - in Savoy, Dauphine, Piedmont and Western Switzerland. According to Josef Hansen, the numerous trials against the Waldensians that took place in these places formed a link between heresy and witchcraft. At first, the practice of persecuting witches met with a negative attitude from both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. So, in the central regions of France, the French provincial parliaments did not encourage witch-hunts and, after the start of persecution, appropriated the exclusive right to consider all witch cases, which often ended in the acquittal of the accused. Priests and bishops in Germany issued proclamations expressly forbidding anyone to be accused of witchcraft. However, after the start of mass hysteria, the voices of protest began to subside.
Mass trials of witches can be divided into three stages, based on their intensity. The first stage of mass persecution falls on the period from 1585 to 1595. The other two fall on the time around 1630 and in the 50-60s of the 17th century. During this time, about 100 thousand processes took place and about 50 thousand victims died. Most of the victims were in the states of Germany, Switzerland, France and Scotland, to a lesser extent, the witch hunt affected England and practically did not affect Italy and Spain. Only a few witch trials took place in America, the most famous example being the Salem events of 1692-1693. As a general trend, one can note the movement of the waves of processes from west to east, so that, for example, in Austria and in the east of Central Europe, the peak of the persecution of witches was reached relatively late, around 1680. Until the middle of the 18th century. witches were still tried and executed in Central Europe.
Witch trials were especially widespread in the territories affected by the Reformation. In Lutheran and Calvinist states, their own, even more severe than Catholic, laws on witchcraft appeared (for example, the review of court cases was canceled). But even in the Catholic states of Germany, witch-hunts were no less cruel at this time, especially in Trier, Bamberg, Mainz and Würzburg. About a thousand people were executed in Cologne in 1627-1639. Witch persecution in Germany culminated during the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, when warring parties accused each other of witchcraft.
According to historians, at the end of the 16th century, the number of witch trials skyrocketed due to the economic crisis, famine, and rising social tension, which was caused by an increase in population and a long-term deterioration of the climate during this century, along with a price revolution. Crop failures, wars, epidemics of plague and syphilis gave rise to despair and panic and increased the tendency of people to look for the secret cause of these misfortunes.
The reason that witch trials became widespread was also the transfer of cases of witchcraft from church courts to secular courts, which made them dependent on the mood of local rulers. The epicenter of mass witchcraft processes was either in the remote provinces of large states, or where the central government was weak. In centralized states with a developed administrative structure, such as France, witch-hunts were less intense than in states that were weak and fragmented.
At the same time, there were those who publicly protested against the persecution of "witches". Thus, the German Jesuit priest Friedrich Spee in 1631 published a work Cautio Criminalis(Caution of the Accusers), which is a critical procedural analysis of the accusation of witchcraft, apparently based on Spee's own experiences in Westphalia as a "witch confessor". This book led to the abandonment of witch burning in a number of places, notably in Mainz.
Eastern Europe[ | ]
Eastern Europe experienced almost no witch-hunts. American researcher Valerie Kivelson believes that witch hysteria did not touch the Orthodox Russian kingdom, since Orthodox theologians were less absorbed in the idea of the sinfulness of the flesh than Catholic and Protestant ones, and, accordingly, a woman as a bodily being worried and frightened Orthodox Christians less. Orthodox priests were careful in their sermons on the topic of witchcraft and corruption and sought to prevent popular lynching of sorcerers and witches. Orthodoxy did not experience the deep crisis that resulted in the Reformation in the West and led to a long era of religious wars. Nevertheless, in the Russian kingdom, Kivelson found information about 258 witch trials, during 106 of which torture was used on the accused (more cruel than in other cases, except those related to high treason). .
End of persecution in Europe[ | ]
The first country to decriminalize witchcraft was Great Britain. This happened in 1735 (Witchcraft Act).
In the German states, the legislative restriction of witch trials consistently took place in Prussia, where in 1706 the powers of accusers were limited by royal decree. In many ways, this happened under the influence of the lectures of the rector of the University of Halle, lawyer and philosopher Christian Thomas, who argued that the doctrine of witchcraft is based not on ancient traditions, as the witch hunters claimed, but on the superstitious decrees of the Roman popes starting with the bull " Summis desiderantes affectibus". In 1714, Friedrich Wilhelm I issued an edict according to which all sentences in witchcraft cases were to be submitted to his personal approval. This severely limited the rights of witch hunters within Prussia. Frederick II, upon accession to the throne, abolished torture (1740). At the same time, in Austria, Empress Maria Theresa established control over witchcraft affairs, which was also facilitated to a certain extent by the “vampire panic” of the 1720-1730s in Serbia.
The last person executed in Germany with the wording “for witchcraft” was the servant Anna Maria Schwegel, who was beheaded on March 30, 1775 in Kempten (Bavaria).
The last person executed in Europe for witchcraft is Anna Geldi, who was executed in Switzerland in 1782 (under torture she confessed to witchcraft, but officially she was sentenced to death for poisoning).
However, sporadic accusations of witchcraft occurred in the jurisprudence of the German states and Great Britain until the end of the first quarter of the 19th century, although witchcraft as such no longer served as a basis for criminal liability. In 1809, the fortune-teller Mary Bateman was hanged for poisoning, whose victims accused her of bewitching them.
Casualty estimates[ | ]
Modern researchers estimate the total number of people executed for witchcraft in the 300-year period of active witch hunting at 40-50 thousand people. In some countries, such as Germany, mainly women were accused of witchcraft, in others (Iceland, Estonia, Russia) - men. Contrary to popular belief in many countries and regions of Europe, the majority of victims of witch trials were men.
Interpretations of the phenomenon[ | ]
Some scholars attribute the “witch hunt” to the role of a relic of the “dark” Middle Ages, which was opposed by secular culture, which personified the advent of the New Age and the progressive phenomena associated with it in social development. However, a significant number of leading demonologists were just humanistically educated philosophers and writers, professors, lawyers and doctors.
Many writers see the "witch hunt" as a means to strengthen the faltering influence of the Catholic Church. Moreover, the idea is expressed that the mass persecution of witches and an unprecedented increase in interest in witchcraft were provoked by the actions of the Inquisition itself. Recognizing that the Catholic Church could indeed try to strengthen its position through the “witch hunt”, one cannot agree with the recognition of the self-contained significance of this factor, if only because both Catholics and Protestants took an active part in the “witch hunt”.
Some researchers identify the "witch hunt" with the struggle against the remnants of paganism. Despite the fact that some of the reconstructions of pre-Christian cults proposed by them and their transfer to the late Middle Ages seem insufficiently substantiated, reflections in this direction are not devoid of rational grain. Pagan reminiscences throughout the Middle Ages were indeed characteristic of the so-called "folk Christianity", and the official church never welcomed them.
Some researchers see representations of the female witch as a reflection of elements of the traditional female subculture, which were then heavily distorted as a result of outside influence. According to them:
Traditional accusations of witchcraft, originally formed in popular culture and playing a functional and stabilizing role in it, under the pressure of various socio-cultural and political factors, religious instability and struggle, with the full participation of the monarchy and due to the unique historical situation that gave rise to "demonomania" and "witchmania" turned into a social stereotype.
The first attempts by European historians to interpret the phenomenon of witch hunting date back to the first half of the 19th century, at the same time many original concepts were created to explain this phenomenon. Particularly interesting is the hypothesis according to which accusations of witchcraft were made mainly against women because the woman was the main custodian of the values of oral archaic culture, through which they were passed on to new generations, and it was she who first of all resisted Christian acculturation. Some researchers, following D. Frazer, believed that the myth of witches was more or less based on reality, and throughout the Middle Ages in Western Europe there were secret pagan organizations of adherents of the fertility cult, worshipers of the "horned god", who kept the old pagan wisdom . This theory received official support from the authorities in National Socialist Germany. Modern historians reject such concepts. The 19th-century historian Jules Michelet wrote of the creation of a kind of "anti-society" by the desperate, oppressed women of the Middle Ages in the face of male dominance, personified by the rural cure and senor. This concept was also revised in the 20th century. So, the researchers calculated that in some regions men made up the vast majority of those accused of witchcraft, and as a rule women were the accusers. A. Ya. Gurevich believed that these theories that existed in the 19th century are a consequence of the culture of Romanticism, which was widespread at that time.
Witch-hunts have also been seen by historians as a cost of modernization, a consequence of and reaction to the rapid progress that swept European society at the beginning of the Modern Age. Of particular interest are the views of researchers working in the direction of finding a connection between the development of demonology - the ideological base that unfolded in the transitional period from the Middle Ages to the new time, the period of "witch hunting" - and medieval folk culture. In this direction, in particular, the famous Russian culturologist-medievist A. Ya. Gurevich worked, who proceeds from the fact that by the 15th century. the culture of the masses (of the uneducated sections of the population) and the culture of the elite diverged too far. The "book" culture of the educated strata began to seem to the representatives of the elite of late medieval society the only possible and acceptable, while they are increasingly beginning to perceive the culture of the common people as an anti-culture. If the first was assessed by them as being wholly oriented towards God, then the second, therefore, should have been, from their point of view, "the offspring of the devil." In medieval folk witchcraft (witchcraft, healing), which was rooted in paganism, representatives of the "bookish" culture saw the embodiment of the peculiarities of the worldview of the broad strata of the people and the way of life that corresponded to it. In this regard, the massacre of the "witches" could be used to suppress popular culture. To do this, it was enough to “demonize” her. Traditional forms of folk life, holidays, customs, which in the heyday of the Western European Middle Ages did not particularly bother anyone, in the treatises of demonologists of the sunset era of the Western European Middle Ages turned into a witches' sabbath, black masses, satanic cults. From these positions, it is possible to explain not only the beginning of mass persecution of witches, but also their cessation: the “witch hunt” fades as the medieval mass culture becomes obsolete and comes to naught by the time the latter, in fact, has already been destroyed.
This point of view is echoed by the positions of a number of other authors. So, he believes that the emerging individualism led to a desire to break the ties of neighborly mutual assistance and the person found himself in a difficult position, since the traditional ideology supported only collectivist values. The belief in the existence of witches, as a way of redirecting guilt, provided a justification for breaking social contact.
Recognition of the "witch hunt" as an expression of the objective process of the struggle between two cultures in many ways reconciles the various options for explaining the causes of the demonomania that unfolded at the end of the Middle Ages. The clash of the two cultures was used to their advantage by almost all sectors of society. Both the church and the secular authorities saw the embodiment of all the features of the people's worldview and the practice corresponding to it, fundamentally hostile to the ideological monopoly claimed by the church and the absolutist state in the 16th and 17th centuries. Therefore, the massacre of witches created an environment conducive to the suppression of popular culture. According to the French historian the end of the persecution of witches at the end of the 17th century. can be explained by the fact that the basis on which the belief in witchcraft grew - the traditional folk culture - was, in fact, already destroyed. Involving (sometimes for completely different reasons) in the "witch hunt", all its participants objectively contributed to the suppression of traditional medieval folk culture - a kind of "cultural revolution" that marks the onset of a new period of history that replaced the Middle Ages.
A quick change in the memory of two or three generations, that is, in a historically insignificant period, the change of all life, its social, moral, religious foundations and value ideas gave rise to a feeling of insecurity, loss of orientation in the mass of the population, caused emotions of fear and a sense of approaching danger. Only this can explain the interesting for the researcher of mass psychology and still not fully explained the phenomenon of hysterical fear that swept Western Europe from the end of the 15th to the middle of the 17th century. It is characteristic that such manifestations of this fear as witch trials, not recognizing the differences between Catholic and Protestant lands, stop at the borders of the classical Renaissance: Russia XV-XVIII centuries. did not know this psychosis.<…>In the atmosphere of the Renaissance, hope and fear, the reckless prowess of some and the feeling of losing ground under the feet of others were closely intertwined. This was the atmosphere of scientific and technological revolution.
Fear was caused by the loss of life orientation. But those who experienced it did not understand this. They were looking for specific culprits, they wanted to find the one who ruined life. Fear wanted to come true.
In general, one can state a wide variety of hypotheses put forward by various historians and the lack of a single point of view on the nature and causes of mass persecution of witches. According to A. Ya. Gurevich: "it must be admitted that historians have not offered a satisfactory explanation for this deep and prolonged socio-religious and psychological crisis, which took place mainly in the Renaissance." According to the researcher Yu. F. Igina, in principle it is impossible to find any single, definite reason for the birth of a witch hunt, and the late medieval European society should be considered “as an integral organism in which all elements interact in a complex system of direct and feedback relationships, excluding the possibility of reduction and finding any one factor capable of determining historical development.
Philosophical reflection[ | ]
The modern meaning of the term "witch hunt"[ | ]
Currently, the expression "witch hunt" is used as a figurative generalized name for campaigns to discredit any social groups for political or other reasons without proper evidence and justification.
Modern witch persecution[ | ]
In the modern world, criminal prosecution for witchcraft persists in some countries. For example, in Saudi Arabia, magical rites are punishable by death. Moreover, this punishment is applied in practice: in 2011, the Saudi authorities beheaded Amina bin Abdulhalim Nassar "for witchcraft and communication with evil spirits." In Tajikistan, witchcraft has been subject to administrative liability since 2008, and since 2015, criminal punishment has been introduced in the form of imprisonment up to 7 years.
see also [ | ]
| Witch-hunt in Wiktionary | |
| Witch-hunt at Wikimedia Commons |
Notes [ | ]
- Laws of Hammurabi
- Herbert Eiden: “Vom Ketzer- zum Hexenprozess. Die Entwicklung geistlicher und weltlicher Rechtsvorstellungen bis zum 17. Jahrhundert.” From the cycle: “Hexenwahn – Ängste der Neuzeit”. (“From heresy to the witch trial. The development of church and secular legal concepts until the 17th century.” From the cycle: “Witchcraft - fears of modern times” Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2002
- N. Maslova. Witchcraft in Europe// / N. S. Gorelov. - ABC Classics, 2005. - S. 23-25. - 512 p. - ISBN 5-352-01402-9.
- Joseph Hansen.. - Historische Bibliothek, 1900. - T. 12. - S. 328. - 538 p. - ISBN 9785876221315.
- Gerd Schverhoff “From Everyday Suspicion to Mass Persecution.” The latest German studies on the history of witchcraft at the beginning of modern times, the almanac "Odysseus: A Man in History." M., 1996. S. 316.
- N. Maslova. Witchcraft in Europe. France// Scourge and Hammer. Witch hunting in the 16th - 18th centuries / N. S. Gorelov. - ABC Classics, 2005. - S. 29-31. - 512 p. - ISBN 5-352-01402-9.
- N. Maslova. Witchcraft in Europe. Germany// Scourge and Hammer. Witch hunting in the 16th - 18th centuries / N. S. Gorelov. - ABC Classics, 2005. - S. 54. - 512 p. - ISBN 5-352-01402-9.
- Rita Voltmer, Franz Irsigler: “Die europäischen Hexenverfolgungen der Frühen Neuzeit – Vorurteile, Faktoren und Bilanzen.” .From the cycle: "Hexenwahn - Ängste der Neuzeit". ("European witch-hunt in the early modern period - prejudices, factors and counterbalances" From the cycle: "Witchcraft - fears of modern times") Ausstellung Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2002
- Valerie Kivelson. Torture, Truth, and Embodying the Intagible in Muscovite Witchcraft Trials // Everyday Life in Russian History: Quotidian Studies in Honor of Daniel Kaiser. Edited by Gary Marker, Joan Neuberger, Mashall Poe, Susan Rupp. - Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2010. - PP. 359-373.
- Gaskill, Malcolm Witchcraft, a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 76.
- Scarre, Geoffrey; Callow, John (2001). Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Europe (second ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 29-33.
- Igina Yu. F. Witchcraft and witches in England. Anthropology of Evil. - St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 2009. - S. 29. - 327 p. - ISBN 5914192749.
- Walter Rummel. ‚Weise‘ Frauen und ‚weise‘ Männer im Kampf gegen Hexerei. Die Widerlegung einer modernen Fabel// Europäische Sozialgeschichte. Festschrift für Wolfgang Schieder (Historische Forschungen 68) . - Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2000. - ISBN 9783428098439.
Medieval witch trials - witch trials - continue to confuse the minds of scientists and those who are interested in history today. Hundreds of thousands accused of witchcraft or connection with the devil were then sent to the stake. What are the reasons for such an insane outbreak of fear of evil spirits, witchcraft that swept Western Europe in the 15th-17th centuries? They are still unclear.
Science almost always considers the medieval witch hunt as something secondary, completely dependent on external circumstances - the state of society, the church. The proposed article makes an attempt to explain the phenomenon of witch-hunting, based on private facts, at first glance, insignificant and not worthy of the attention of researchers. Much in the published article may seem unexpected. I hasten to assure you: by publishing my findings, I am not striving for a sensation, but I am firmly convinced that the facts presented and their analysis deserve attention and further study.
For most historians (domestic and foreign), the witch hunt is a terrifying phenomenon, but it fully corresponds to the general structure of the superstitious, dark Middle Ages. This point of view is very popular today. And yet it is easy to refute it with the help of chronology. Most of the witches were burned at the stake of the Inquisition by no means in the initial period of the Middle Ages. The persecution of witches was gaining momentum in Europe in parallel with the development of humanism and the scientific worldview, that is, in the Renaissance.
Soviet historiography has always considered the witch hunt as one of the manifestations of the feudal Catholic reaction that unfolded in the 16th-17th centuries. True, she did not take into account the fact that the servants of the devil were burned with might and main in Protestant countries: everyone could become a victim, regardless of social status and religious beliefs. The most popular social theory today has not escaped such a view: witch-hunting is only a very clear indicator of the degree of aggravation of intra-social relations, the desire to find "scapegoats" who can be blamed for all the problems and difficulties of being.
Of course, the witch hunt, like any other historical phenomenon, cannot be studied abstractly, in isolation from the general historical outline. There is no need to argue with this. However, when such an approach becomes prevailing, one has the right to ask the question: is the phenomenon itself with its inherent features not lost behind the general conclusions? Facts and evidence from sources often only illustrate the picture drawn by the researcher. Although it is the study of facts and their details that is primary in any historical research.
None of the authors talking about the witch hunt ignored all the stages of the witchcraft process: the arrest of the witch, the investigation of crimes, the sentencing and execution. Perhaps the greatest attention is paid to various tortures, which brought almost one hundred percent confession in all the most heinous and monstrous accusations.
However, let us turn our attention to a much less well-known procedure that preceded torture and, in fact, served as the main evidence of guilt. We are talking about the search for the so-called "seal of the devil" on the body of a witch or sorcerer. She was searched for, first simply by examining the body of the suspect, and then inflicting injections with a special needle. The judge and the executioners tried to find places on the accused that differed from the rest of the skin surface: whitish spots, sores, small swellings, which, as a rule, had such reduced pain sensitivity that they did not feel the prick of the needle.
Here is what the Russian pre-revolutionary historian S. Tucholka says about this in his work “Processes on witchcraft in Western Europe in the 15-17 centuries”: “Even before torture, the sorceress was subjected to an operation to search for the stigmata of the devil. For this, the patient was blindfolded and long needles were pierced into the body ". Ya. Kantorovich also writes about this in his work Medieval Witch Trials, published in 1889: turned to the test with a needle. Often such a place devoid of sensitivity was actually found on the body. " The Soviet researcher I. Grigulevich also reported that the presence of the "Vedov's seal" was considered an absolute sign of guilt. True, such facts were cited only in order to show the superstition and obscurantism inherent in both the medieval world in general and the clergy in particular.
However, the attitude of the direct participants in the events, especially demonologists, to the witch marks on the body was extremely serious. One of the first who speaks in his writings about devilish marks is the theologian Lambert Dano: "There is not a single witch on whom the devil would not put some kind of mark or sign of his power." This opinion was shared by almost all theologians and demonologists. For example, Peter Osterman, in a treatise published in 1629, argued: "There has not yet been a person who, having a stigma, would lead an impeccable life, and not one of those convicted of witchcraft has been convicted without a stigma." The same point of view was held by the demonologist in the crown - James I Stuart. This tireless fighter against witches in the treatise "Demonology" declared: "No one serves Satan and is not called to worship before him without being marked with his sign. The brand is the highest evidence, much more indisputable than accusations or even confessions."
There is nothing strange and wonderful in the very existence of some spots or marks on the human body. But if we admit that the stories about witch marks have a real basis, then the question should be asked: what were these marks?
There are two main types of mysterious signs - the devil's stain and the witch's sign. The latter was a kind of tubercle or outgrowth on the human body and, according to demonologists, was used by witches to feed various spirits with their own blood. The brand of the devil can rather be compared with a birthmark.
The researcher N. Pshibyshevsky in his work "The Synagogue of Satan" gives a fairly detailed description of these signs: "The surface of the body of the possessed is also marked on the outside with special signs. These are small, no more than a pea, places of the skin insensitive, bloodless and lifeless. They sometimes form red or black spots, but rare. Just as rarely they are marked by a deepening of the skin. For the most part they are invisible from the outside and are on the genitals. Often they are on the eyelids, on the back, on the chest, and sometimes, but rarely, they change place. "
The Italian demonologist M. Sinistrari notes: "This mark is not always of the same shape or contour, sometimes it looks like a hare, sometimes like a toad's foot, a spider, a puppy, a dormouse. It is placed ... in men under the eyelids or under the armpits , or on the lips, or on the shoulders, in the anus or somewhere else. In women, usually on the chest or in intimate places. "
And yet, the main feature by which the devilish spot was distinguished in the Middle Ages was its insensitivity to pain. Therefore, when examining a potential witch, suspicious spots were necessarily pierced with a needle. And if there was no reaction to the injection, the accusation was considered proven. (Another significant feature of the "devil's marks": when pricked, these places not only did not feel pain, but also did not bleed.)
Let us renounce fantastic details, such as a devil burning with malice, branding his adherents with his own hand (or other limb), and admit the presence of any specific marks on the human body. But after all, the description of "witch signs" is very reminiscent of some kind of skin disease.
Indeed, why not assume that the vast majority of people accused of witchcraft had a common disease for all? And only one disease fits all of the above symptoms. This is leprosy, or leprosy, - and today one of the most terrible ailments, and in the Middle Ages - a real scourge of God.
Here is what the medical encyclopedia, published in 1979, says about this disease: “It usually begins imperceptibly, sometimes with general malaise and fever. Then whitish or red spots appear on the skin, in these areas the skin becomes insensitive to heat and cold, does not feel touch and pain. Isn't it true that the picture of the disease is very reminiscent of demonological treatises?
In the information gleaned from the medical literature, one can find an explanation for such a phenomenon as a witch's nipple. With the further development of the disease, the skin begins to gradually thicken, ulcers, nodes are formed, which can indeed resemble a nipple in their shape. Here is another quote: “Sometimes, on unchanged skin, limited lepromatous infiltrates appear in the dermis (tubercles) or in the hypodermis (nodules), which can merge into more or less powerful conglomerates. The skin underneath is oily, may differ in peeling, sensitivity is normal at first, later it gets upset and goes down in varying degrees. Even the location of the "devil's signs" and lepromatous spots on the human body coincides.
And, finally, one more argument that allows identifying leprosy and "devil's marks": according to modern medical data, "sensitivity impairment in skin lesions is observed only in leprosy and in no other skin disease."
So, with a high degree of certainty, it can be argued that almost all sorcerers and witches condemned to death were stricken with leprosy at one stage or another. The following conclusion suggests itself: the persecution of witches was based on the desire of medieval society to protect itself from a terrible disease, the spread of which reached its climax in the 15th-17th centuries. Destroying lepers (a measure, no doubt, cruel), by the end of the 17th century, Europe to some extent coped with the epidemic of leprosy.
Did the judges themselves believe that it was the devil's spawn, and not sick and outcast people, who were sent to the fire? There is no absolutely sure answer to this question yet. However, it is likely that in the Middle Ages people knew the symptoms of leprosy quite well, and at least the privileged, educated layer of state and church leaders realized that they were fighting not with the servants of Satan, but with a contagious disease. After all, it is no coincidence that doctors played a huge role in conducting witch trials. According to one modern scholar, doctors "took a fairly active professional role in the trials of witches. Their duties included diagnosing diseases that arose as a result of witchcraft and medical treatment of torture. Often their imprisonment decided the fate of the unfortunate witch."
And yet, seeing in the hunt for witches and sorcerers only a quarantine measure, and in judges and executioners - fighters with a dangerous disease, we are unnecessarily modernizing a phenomenon more than five centuries old. Leprosy at that time could and probably was considered as a sign of possession by the devil's power, and that is why the carriers of this disease were declared a merciless war of extermination. This aspect of the matter deserves careful study.
And yet there is good reason to believe that the witch hunt was objectively a fight against lepers.
But first, let's turn to the procedure for identifying witches that existed among the people. It is known that the fear of the evil eye and damage, inherent in mankind since ancient times, is still alive. What can we say about the time of the early Middle Ages? An angry mob often staged lynching of a person in whom they saw a sorcerer. But in order to punish a witch or sorcerer, they must first be identified.
What means, born in the depths of superstitious consciousness, were not used here! The witch was recognized by the flight of a knife with the image of a cross thrown over her. And in order to identify all the witches in your parish, you should have taken an Easter egg to church. True, the curious risked at the same time: if the witch had time to tear out and crush the egg, his heart should have burst. The children's shoes, smeared with lard, brought to the church threatened to immobilize the witch. But perhaps the most common was the water test. Having tied the right hand of the witch to the left leg, and the left hand to the right leg, the witch was thrown into the nearest reservoir. If she began to sink, then she was innocent, but if the water did not accept the sinner, then there was no doubt: she definitely served Satan. It was widely believed that the witch differs from other people in her smaller weight: it is not for nothing that she flies through the air. Therefore, often those accused of witchcraft were tested by weighing.
Each of these methods could be used in one place in Europe and remain unknown in the rest. However, since the end of the 15th century, spontaneous massacres of witches have been replaced by a clear system of combating them, in which the church and the state take an active part. To identify a witch, only one procedure is used - pricking with a needle. The hitherto unknown trial is spreading across Europe, from Sweden to Spain. And everywhere the procedure is carried out the same way. Doesn't this fact itself raise suspicions?
An indirect proof of my version is the nature of witch processes (after all, it is not for nothing that they are called epidemics in the literature devoted to them). It cannot be said that witches were persecuted regularly and evenly throughout Western Europe. Rather, we can talk about local and time-limited outbreaks of witch-hunts. In one town, bonfires are blazing with might and main, and in others no one seems to have heard of witches - perhaps because a sharp fight against witches unfolded in places most affected by leprosy, and ended with the destruction of the threatening number of lepers.
If we assume that the medieval slayers of witches and sorcerers knew what they were actually fighting, then we consider it logical their desire to isolate those accused of witchcraft from society as thoroughly as possible. Many authors (for example, Ya. Kantorovich and N. Speransky) mention that witches were kept in special, separate prisons. Demonologists in their instructions warn of the danger of close contact with witches, and judges are advised to avoid the touch of witches during interrogations. Although theologians believed that those who fought witches had the blessing of the church, and therefore were not subject to their charms, practice often spoke of the opposite. In the literature, there are cases when the executioner and the judge who led the trials were accused of witchcraft. This is not surprising: they had enough opportunities to become infected.
Of course, the greatest danger of infection threatened primarily relatives. They were the first to notice the signs of a terrible disease, and then fear for their lives took precedence over love for their neighbor. No wonder it was relatives who often (as historical documents say) became informers. However, even such a step did not avert from them suspicions of adherence to the witch infection. Therefore, if at least one of the family members was executed on charges of witchcraft, then suspicion lay on all the rest of their lives. It could not be otherwise: the incubation period of leprosy can be several years, and therefore, anyone who communicated with the infected was fearful. Often, for safety net, the whole family was executed at once.
The execution of children accused of witchcraft has always caused the greatest horror and was considered as wild fanaticism. In the XV-XVII centuries, even two-year-olds were erected on a fire. Perhaps the most shocking example comes from the city of Bamberg, where 22 girls from 9 to 13 years old were set on fire at the same time. As already mentioned, belief in witchcraft is characteristic of all mankind, but the mass accusation of witchcraft of children distinguishes only Western Europe of the 15th-17th centuries. A fact in favor of the stated hypothesis: leprosy does not make out age, and every infected person, adult or child, is a danger.
Sometimes, very rarely, the accused of witchcraft was cleared of charges. But even after his release, he remained, in fact, an outcast, subjected to the strictest quarantine: he was forbidden to enter the church or assigned a special place in it; even in his own house he lived in isolation. Quite reasonable prescriptions in case of a possible danger of infection.
Another piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis is the stereotyped image of a sorceress created by popular consciousness. People climbed the fire without distinction of gender, age, social status, anyone could be accused of witchcraft. But the descriptions of a typical witch turned out to be the most stable. The English historian R. Hart in his "History of Witchcraft" cites the testimonies of contemporaries about how, in their opinion, a typical witch looks like. Here is one of them: “They are crooked and hunchbacked, their faces constantly bear the seal of melancholy, terrifying everyone around them. Their skin is covered with some kind of spots. with a face pitted and wrinkled, her limbs constantly shaking."
In the medical literature, this is how a patient with leprosy is described in the last stages of the development of the disease. In addition, the medical encyclopedia reports, "in advanced cases, the eyebrows fall out, the earlobes increase, facial expression changes greatly, vision weakens to complete blindness, the voice becomes hoarse." A typical witch from a fairy tale speaks in a hoarse voice and has a long, sharply protruding nose on her face. This is also no coincidence. With leprosy, "the nasal mucosa is very often affected, which leads to its perforation and deformation. Chronic pharyngitis often develops, damage to the larynx leads to hoarseness."
Of course, it is easy to reproach me for the fact that the hypothesis does not find direct confirmation in historical sources. Indeed, there is no document, and it is unlikely that there will ever be, that would directly speak of a witch hunt as a fight against lepers. And yet indirect evidence of this can be found. Let us turn, for example, to the most famous demonological treatise - The Hammer of the Witches.
The pious inquisitors Sprenger and Institoris ask the question in it: can witches send various diseases to people, including leprosy. Arguing first that "there is a certain difficulty, whether or not to consider it possible for witches to send leprosy and epilepsy. After all, these diseases usually arise due to insufficiency of internal organs," the authors of The Hammer nevertheless report: "We found that these illnesses are sometimes sent by sorcery." And the final conclusion is: "There is no such disease that witches could not send to a person with God's permission. They can even send leprosy and epilepsy, which is confirmed by scientists."
There are examples when demonologists themselves speak of witchcraft as a contagious disease. The Italian theologian Guazzo, in his Compendium malefikarum, notes that "Vedic infection can often be transmitted to children by their sinful parents. Every day we meet examples of children being corrupted by this infection."
Of great interest in the study of witchcraft processes are the works of anti-demonologists, people who, during the period of general fear of witches, dared to say a word in their defense. One of these rare personalities was the physician Johann Weyer, who expressed his view on the problem of witchcraft in his essay On the Tricks of Demons. In it, he argues with famous demonologists and tries to prove the inconsistency of their views. What were the latter? Oddly enough, one of them, Karptsov, believed that "themselves witches and lamias benefit if they are put to death as soon as possible." Weyer believes that "Karptsov's argument is an excellent argument that could justify the murder: what if one of us took the life of an insignificant person, born only to eat fruits, stricken with a Gallic disease, and would explain his deed by what is best for him would die sooner?"
A very curious remark, especially when you consider that the same leprosy was called the Gallic disease. This allows us to see in the words of Karptsov the desire to justify himself before himself and society, to assure everyone that the mission of mercy was carried out by the extermination of leper witches.
Let's summarize. Despite the obvious lack of historical documents, one can still say that the hypothesis put forward has an evidence base. The main thing in it is the presence on the bodies of all witches of "devil's seals", which I identify with leprosy lesions. A natural question arises: did the previous researchers of witch processes have a different interpretation of the "seal of the devil"? Oddly enough, these marks on the body did not arouse much interest from researchers. They cite the search for "devilish signs" from the witch only as an example illustrating the savagery of the medieval clergy and authorities, who mistook ordinary wen, sores and the like for "satanic seals".
The fact that witches often did not feel pain from injections was tried to be explained by nervous illness and exaltation caused by fear - the witches fell into a state of a kind of trance, similar to that observed in a hypnotist session. Well, it's quite possible. However, then either the whole body of a person, or a significant part of it, becomes insensitive. The facts cited earlier speak of a "devil's brand" - a small, strictly limited area of \u200b\u200bthe skin. "If you prick such a place with a needle, then the blood does not flow, and there is no sensation of pain, which, however, is felt by all parts of the body," writes N. Pshibytaevsky in his work. Unfortunately, neither in domestic nor in foreign historiography is there a single attempt to look at the identity of witch trials and persecution of lepers. Perhaps only the French researcher J. Le Goff in his work "Civilization of the Medieval West" considers the categories of lepers and witches together. He considers both of them to be a kind of "scapegoat", on which society made responsible for all problems and sins. According to the scientist, "medieval society needed these people, they were suppressed because they were dangerous, there was an almost conscious desire to mystically transfer to them all the evil that society sought to get rid of in itself." However, by explaining the persecution of witches and lepers by the same reasons, Le Goff in no way combines these categories themselves.
This fact rather speaks in favor of my hypothesis. If it were known from the sources about the simultaneous persecution of leprosy patients and the trials of witches in one place or another in Europe, then they would have to be recognized as two completely different phenomena. But they do not coincide either spatially or chronologically, and then the version that witch trials are just a cover for the fight against leprosy should not seem so strange.
D. ZANKOV, historian (Volkhov, Novgorod region).
Literature
Until a few years ago, it was impossible to find books on demonology and the fight against witchcraft in bookstores. Many of them have been published today.
Sprenger J., Institoris G. Hammer of witches. - M., 1991.
Demonology of the Renaissance. - M., 1995.
Robbins R.H. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. - M., 1996.
Tucholka S. Proceedings on witchcraft in Western Europe in the XV-XVII centuries. - St. Petersburg, 1909.
Kantorovich Ya. Medieval witch processes. - M., 1899.
edited news VENDETTA - 29-07-2011, 09:43