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Witches and The Inquisition
Christians of all backgrounds share a common shame with regards to their treatment of witches. It was a very dark time in history regardless of whether it was in a Catholic or Protestant society. In this article I'm going to try to sort out the fact from fiction about the witch burnings of the Middle Ages.
In the last 20 years virtually all reputable secular historians have revised witch death rates to 40,000-60,000 and less than 500 witch deaths caused directly by the Church through the Inquisition.
Although these deaths are inexcusable, they are a long way from the 9 million number quoted in the Nation Film Board's popular (but unhistorical) movie called "The Burning Times." Jenny Gibbons belongs to a wiccan movement and she is also an historian. If anyone should be against the Church it would be her. She wrote an article found on the pagan web site "Covenant of the Goddess." Although the site and the wiccan path in general make me cringe, her article is stunning. She has an MA in medieval history and a minor in the Great Hunt. I have a great respect for the integrity with which she reveals the truth about the burning times to her wiccan associates.
Since the late 1970's, a quiet revolution has taken place in the study of historical witchcraft and the Great European Witch Hunt. ... many theories which reigned supreme thirty years ago have vanished, swept away by a flood of new data. the quantity and quality of available evidence has dramatically improved...Today, for the first time, we have a good idea of the dimensions of the Great Hunt: where the trials occurred, who was tried in them, who did the killing, and how many people lost their lives. Every aspect of the Great Hunt, from chronology to death toll, has changed. And if your knowledge of the "Burning Times" is based on popular or Pagan literature, nearly everything you know may be wrong.
For years, the responsibility for the Great Hunt has been dumped on the Catholic Church's door-step. 19th century historians ascribed the persecution to religious hysteria. And when Margaret Murray proposed that witches were members of a Pagan sect, popular writers trumpeted that the Great Hunt was not a mere panic, but rather a deliberate attempt to exterminate Christianity's rival religion. Today, we know that there is absolutely no evidence to support this theory.
When the Church was at the height of its power (11th-14th centuries) very few witches died. Persecutions did not reach epidemic levels until after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position as Europe's indisputable moral authority. Moreover most of the killing was done by secular courts. Church courts tried many witches but they usually imposed non-lethal penalties. A witch might be excommunicated, given penance, or imprisoned, but she was rarely killed. The Inquisition almost invariably pardoned any witch who confessed and repented.
... in York, England, as described by Keith Thomas (Religion and the Decline of Magic). At the height of the Great Hunt (1567-1640) one half of all witchcraft cases brought before church courts were dismissed for lack of evidence. No torture was used, and the accused could clear himself by providing four to eight "compurgators", people who were willing to swear that he wasn't a witch. Only 21% of the cases ended with convictions, and the Church did not impose any kind of corporal or capital punishment.
... Ironically, the worst courts were local courts. ..."Community-based" courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused witches... national courts tended to have professional, trained staff -- men who were less likely to discard important legal safeguards in their haste to see "justice" done.
But what of the Inquisition? For many, the "Inquisition" and the "Burning Times" are virtually synonymous. The myth of the witch-hunting inquisition was built on several assumptions and mistakes, all of which have been overturned in the last twenty-five years.
...a common translation error ... said that a witch was tried "by inquisition"..Later, when historians examined the records in greater detail, they found that the majority did not involve the Inquisition, merely an inquisition ...older and more popular texts (such as Rossell Hope Robbins' Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology) still have the Inquisition killing witches in times and places where it did not even exist.
...In the 1970's, when feminist and Neo-Pagan authors turned their attention to the witch trials, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) was the only manual readily available in translation. Authors naively assumed that the book painted an accurate picture of how the Inquisition tried witches. Heinrich Kramer, the text's demented author, was held up as a typical inquisitor. His rather stunning sexual preoccupations were presented as the Church's "official" position on witchcraft. Actually the Inquisition immediately rejected the legal procedures Kramer recommended and censured the inquisitor himself just a few years after the Malleus was published. Secular courts, not inquisitorial ones, resorted to the Malleus.
...Lamothe-Langon's [who's notoriously forged] trials were the last great piece of "evidence", and when they fell, scholars re-examined the Inquisition's role in the Burning Times. What they found was quite startling. In 1258 Pope Alexander IV explicitly refused to allow the Inquisition from investigating charges of witchcraft: "The Inquisitors, deputed to investigate heresy, must not intrude into investigations of divination or sorcery without knowledge of manifest heresy involved." The gloss on this passage explained what "manifest heresy" meant: "praying at the altars of idols, to offer sacrifices, to consult demons, to elicit responses from them... or if [the witches] associate themselves publicly with heretics." In other words, in the 13th century the Church did not consider witches heretics or members of a rival religion.
It wasn't until 1326, almost 100 years later, that the Church reversed its position and allowed the Inquisition to investigate witchcraft. But the only significant contribution that was made was in the development of "demonology", the theory of the diabolic origin of witchcraft. As John Tedeschi demonstrates in his essay "Inquisitorial Law and the Witch" (in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen's Early Modern European Witchcraft) the Inquisition still played a very small role in the persecution. From 1326-1500, few deaths occurred. Richard Kieckhefer (European Witch Trials) found 702 definite executions in all of Europe from 1300-1500; of these, only 137 came from inquisitorial or church courts. By the time that trials were common (early 16th century) the Inquisition focused on the proto-Protestants. When the trials peaked in the 16th and 17th century, the Inquisition was only operating in two countries: Spain and Italy, and both had extremely low death tolls.
In fact, in Spain the Inquisition worked diligently to keep witch trials to a minimum. Around 1609, a French witch-craze triggered a panic in the Basque regions of Spain. Gustav Henningsen (The Witches' Advocate) documented the Inquisition's work in brilliant detail. Although several inquisitors believed the charges, one skeptic convinced La Suprema (the ruling body of the Spanish Inquisition) that this was groundless hysteria. La Suprema responded by issuing an "Edict of Silence" forbidding all discussion of witchcraft. For, as the skeptical inquisitor noted, "There were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about."
...The Witches Court records showed that there was no such thing as an "average" witch: there was no characteristic that the majority of witches shared, in all times and places. Not gender. Not wealth. Not religion. Nothing. The only thing that united them was the fact that they were accused of witchcraft. The diversity of witches is one of the strongest arguments against the theory that the Great Hunt was a deliberate pogrom aimed at a specific group of people. If that was true, then most witches would have something in common.
Jenny is a wiccan historian writing for the Covenant of the Goddess website. I quote Jenny because of her wiccan background. If any web site would be against Catholicism this site would be but she had the integrity to report the results of her research. I also have found similar information from secular and religious historians. The article originally appeared in the The Pomegranate, the New Journal of Neo-pagan Studies. Lammas 1998, Volume #5 http://chass.colostate-pueblo.edu/natrel/pom/old/POM5a1.html a live article is here.
http://www.davidmacd.com/catholic/burning_times_inquisition_witches.htm
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17 ก.พ. 55 01:49:21
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