The Burning Times

Most of us are aware that during the Renaissance the Christians began a concerted campaign to seek out and destroy witches.  However, it is not so widely known that many of the victims of these witch hunts were actually rural people who practiced pre-Christian folk religions.  The words "pagan" and "heathen" in the original languages referred to people of the country, or to civilians.  Christianity was an urban and revolutionary religion.  During the early years of Christianity (the IIIrd Century AD) there were great tensions between Christians and pagans.  Eventually the religion dominated the Medieval urban world, and the rural areas remained largely pagan, while adopting some marginal Christian behaviors.  Similarly slow transitions and hybridizations can be seen in rural Africa and Latin America now.  Until around 1100, the Church coexisted with these pagans and even assimilated pagan influences.  Rather suddenly, something changed, and they turned violently against these rural people, whose fertility religion was focused on bringing a bountiful harvest and many offspring.  The campaign was distracted during the Crusades, but as soon as the Crusades were over and the Muslim invaders were nearly beaten back out of Spain, the force and zeal of the Christian warriors was turned against their own people in the form of the Inquisition. 

Initially, the Inquisition served to purify the land of Jewish and Muslim influence and people.  On the heels of riots and unrest that began in 1391, the year 1481 gave the Spanish a Papal dispensation to harass Jews who had converted or pretended to convert to Christianity.   The almost immediate subsequent fragmentation of the Catholic Church into various Protestant denominations during the 1500's added further fuel to the battle between these imagined forces of good and evil.  It should be pointed out that the French and the Spanish were especially violent in their persecution of Protestants.  The English were oppressive to the Catholics there, but not nearly so violent toward them.  The Catholics used intense interrogation techniques combined with torture.  The Protestants used hanging and less torture to deal with witches and heretics.   

The Inquisition, and the later Protestant Witch Trials used the legal system and torture to interrogate the victims, and extract confessions.  Nearly all those who confessed were finally killed.  Those who did not confess were all killed or at least imprisoned indefinitely.  It was a horrible chapter in the history of Christianity.

Contemporary Neopagans such as Starhawk suggest that these trials targeted especially elderly, poverty stricken, unmarried women.  The children's archetypal, Halloween witch is better known to our society as the "bag lady" or homeless woman.  In a slightly more superstitious time, it was expedient to blame disease and famine on that crazy old woman that lived in a cave and cursed and conversed with imaginary companions and assailants.  

They also suggest that there was a concerted effort on the part of the male medical profession to stamp out their competitors: the midwives with their herbal potions.  Male doctors, they claim, used men's-only Universities to put these women out of business.  They also used leaches and toxic potions to "treat" the infirm.  Until the last 150 years, doctors were generally regarded even by the educated public as dangerous last resorts.  Recent statistics show that illnesses and injuries originating in the health care institutions themselves are the fourth leading cause of death today.  Poetry and drama from the Renaissance often portrays doctors as scatterbrained lunatics who kill their patients out of sheer stupidity.  Enormous changes in the medical profession came rapidly once they figured out that draining blood was not a good way to lower a fever, and that many diseases were produced by infectious organisms. 

It is also clear that any woman who spoke out in a political way was easily squelched by the male-dominated society.  In a few cases, men accused their own wives, probably on the basis of nagging. In many cases, the victims were women who were independent--either independently wealthy, and therefore in possession of power that men resented, or alone and poor.  Either way, these single women were easy targets, and if they did anything the Church or men did not like, they were quickly arrested and "processed" as witches.   

It is certain that the Protestant Witch Trials and the Catholic Inquisition can be described as the Women's Holocaust.  Estimates for the number of women killed during the period from 1400-1700 vary dramatically.  The newer and more convincing estimates are considerably lower--around half a million (a large figure in light of the much smaller population of the world at that time).  Apart from the specific number of people killed, all of the following information is undisputed common knowledge:  

The falseness of the accusations against these people is also quite evident.  People confessed to crimes they did not commit because their leg bones were being crushed with large hammers, their skin was pulled off; the list of creative horrors raises doubts in my mind as to who (if anyone) was actually "possessed by devils."  

Perhaps you can see some psychological and political processes involved in the current popularity of witchcraft.  What do they suggest to you?  If you think that these people were not rightfully killed, what does it suggest to you that the Church became so obsessed with a fictional enemy?  

However many were killed during the Witch Craze, or the "Burning Times," it is definitely quite a dark spot in the past, especially since very few of these women (and some men) were actually guilty of the sorts of crimes they were attributing to them.  Using phantasmagoric books written to tantalize and scandalize, the agents of dogmatic intolerance assembled a might force of genocide that targeted women.  

None of these explanations is based upon the notion that the Burning Times had anything to do with accepting the notion that evil spirits were involved in the process (except as a joke).   One more "scientific explanation" is this one:

The "Burning Times" came to full flame at the same time that the mechanical juggernaut of science and reason was toppling the solid, medieval edifice of Catholic, scholastic/Aristotelian doctrine.  I suggest that the Church realized at that time that the pagan superstitions that they had tolerated and even assimilated (which included rural fertility rituals and a few mistaken ideas from Aristotle), were in the gravest danger in the face of the discoveries of Descartes, Galileo and Newton (not to mention Martin Luther).  One of the more thorough and interesting Internet treatments I found on this subject on the Internet was a message posted to a Homer Campfire e-discussion group.  (Click here)

Rather than being a wholly superstitious act when the Christians sought out and destroyed witches, I think it can be argued that it was an attempt to "clean house" by converting the rural pagans to the city religion of Catholicism.  The Protestant Reformation symbolized the new inquisition of mercantilist capitalism, empirical pragmatism and the mechanistic paradigm.  What few witches there actually were had probably all been killed, but there were still pagan rituals being veiled by Catholic worship, and silly ideas like the flat earth.  The Church knew that they had to become scientific, but they had to do it on their terms.  Being scientific could not include astrology (which had already been incorporated into Catholic art), palm reading, witches, religious heretics, etc.  In response, the religion became more centered on the search for historical validation of the scriptures through archeology.  The new Christianity was rational, pragmatic, scriptural and deeply motivated to prove that all other religions were just false superstitions or "myths."  As a consequence of this stance, it is not inconceivable that a turn of a spade full of earth in Israel could put an end to Christianity.

What do you think of the comparison between the Nazi Holocaust and the "Women's Holocaust?" 

What do you think were the causal factors in the Burning Times? 

The methods of interrogation and torture were extremely creative, bizarre, and incredibly painful and effective.  The end result was almost invariably death by hanging, drowning or burning the mutilated, crushed body of the "confessee."  How does this fit in with the Scriptural teachings of the New Testament? 

Modern Christians attack modern witchcraft from a variety of angles.  Most of these attacks are nothing more than sectarian vitriol and merit no serious attention from anyone outside of these religions.  However, some interesting and more thoughtful attacks have been assembled that do merit attention.  For instance, take a look at these carefully crafted philosophical arguments based on readings of several influential neopagans, by Norman L. Geisler at the Southern Evangelical Seminary.  How effective are these arguments at addressing the central issues of those who have chosen to reject the Judeo-Christian tradition?