Misconceptions about the Witch-Trials

Everyone is familiar with the concept of a witch-hunt. Witch-hunts appear in books, movies, television, and plays. The idea is so familiar that it has become metonymic for any situation in which a person is persecuted without evidence. But there is also a prodigious number of misconceptions about what witch-trials were, who led them, when they took place, and what they were really about.

Misconception #1: Witch-hunts happened during the Middle Ages

In ironic reality, any accusation of witchcraft during the Middle Ages was far more likely to result in the person making the accusation being punished or executed than the person being accused. Throughout almost the entirety of the Middle Ages, the official position of the Catholic Church was that witches did not exist and that belief in witchcraft was an ignorant pagan superstition. Consequently, anyone who believed in witchcraft was deemed guilty of heresy and was liable to be punished as such if the person persisted in this view after being warned to abandon it. A person who openly claimed to be a practitioner of magic could be tried for heresy.

In spite of the Church’s best efforts to eradicate stories about witches and witchcraft, they were apparently widely believed among laypersons. The Canon Episcopi, written in the tenth century, provides a detailed description of contemporary beliefs about witchcraft. It denounces all of them as heretical superstitions and characterizes the people who believe in them as deluded.

In the 1300s, however, official views began to change. One of the most important developments leading towards the acceptance of the existence of witchcraft was the new idea of a “pact with the Devil,” in which a person agreed to serve Satan in exchange for earthly powers. This idea became incorporated into the pre-existing witchcraft lore and revolutionized the way people thought about the concept of witchcraft. Previously those who believed in witchcraft had assumed that witches derived their power from Satan indirectly and did not necessarily know where it came from; now, with this idea of the Faustian pact, witches were active agents of Satan on earth, who knew fully what they were doing.

Two other major shifts helped bring belief in witchcraft into the mainstream. One shift was in how people thought about Satan. During the High Middle Ages, Satan had been seen as a defeated laughingstock, the ultimate loser in the cosmic conflict between good and evil. The Golden Legend, a collection of legendary saints’ lives compiled in around 1260 by the monk Jacobus de Varagine, had portrayed Satan as a buffoon, easily outwitted by the crafty saints. In the Divine Comedy, written in the early 1300s, Dante had shown Satan trapped, frozen up to his waist at the bottom of the Ninth Circle of Hell. As the fourteenth century drew to a close, however, Satan’s power seemed to be on the rise. The Black Death (1347–1351), along with growing corruption in the church, the resulting distrust of clergy, and other societal changes made people more frightened and pessimistic about the future and made it easier for a person to believe that the neighbors were in league with Satan.

The next major shift came with the reintroduction of classical esotericism. The Corpus Hermeticum and the writings of the Neoplatonic philosophers Porphyrios and Iamblichos were being translated from Greek into Latin for the first time, thus making them available to westerners. Renaissance scholars became fascinated by these works and studied them intently. In an era when the most educated scholars were studying Hermetic and Neoplatonic writings, witchcraft no longer seemed quite so incredible.

In 1487, the Dominican friar and failed Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer published his book the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of the Witches”), which set forth radical new arguments. Kramer contended that the superstitious belief in witchcraft described in the Canon Episcopi was different from “modern witchcraft.” Kramer argued that an Inquisitor must use any methods necessary to force a confession out of an accused witch, including torture and deceit. He also determined that a conviction of witchcraft was proof that the person was guilty, because God would never allow an innocent person to be condemned of anything.

ABOVE: Title page of an edition of the Malleus Maleficarum from 1669

Most disturbingly of all, the Malleus Maleficarum reveals Kramer’s bizarre and perverse fascination with female sexuality. Kramer argued, in line with but on the far extreme end of contemporary thought on the subject, that all women were inherently inclined towards witchcraft and that basically all women except for those rigorously devoted to pious asceticism were secretly witches. He describes in lurid detail all the sexually explicit rituals which he claimed witches engaged in. He shows an even more bizarre and perverse fascination with all the horrific things a witch can allegedly do to a man’s penis, spending page after page describing them.

Kramer sent a copy of the book to the theological faculty at the University of Cologne hoping for a letter of commendation; instead they condemned the book as heretical, so Kramer forged his own letter unanimously commending the book and attributed it to the faculty. He, or a later publisher, also falsely appended the name of Jacob Sprenger, a respected Inquisitor, to the book as a coauthor to all editions published after 1519 to lend it further appearance of academic respectability. The Malleus Maleficarum became the veritable witch-hunter’s Bible (apart from the actual Bible, of course) for nearly the next two centuries. It was widely used by both Catholics and Protestants alike.

One of the most vehement critics of the new witchcraft hysteria was the Dutch physician and demonologist Johann Weyer, who argued in his essay “On the Shipwreck of Souls” for a return to the traditional medieval view reflected in the Canon Episcopi that witches did not exist. Weyer declared that those who claimed to practice magic were simply deluded or suffering from mental illness, not evil, and that they should be treated accordingly. Most shockingly, he declared that Satan deliberately promoted false belief in witchcraft in order to trick Christians into executing innocent people.

Weyer, however, was only the radical fringe of theology and no mainstream theologians dared take his dangerous views seriously. Eventually, by the early 1600s, both Protestants and Catholics alike came to agree that not believing in ghosts or witchcraft was equivalent to not believing in Satan and that anyone who did not believe in witchcraft was a heretic.

Why, then, do we assume they happened during the Middle Ages? It is because the era when the witch trials did happen happens to have roughly coincided with another, very different event in European history: the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the so-called “Enlightenment.” William Harvey, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Isaac Newton, and Montesquieu all lived during the height of the witchcraft hysteria, which reached its peak in the late 1500s and early 1600s and continued until the end of the seventeenth century.

To us looking back on it, it seems baffling that the same era that produced so many original thinkers and the birth of modern science was also an era when thousands of people were being tried and executed for witchcraft. To reconcile this, people naturally assume that witch-trials must have instead belonged to an earlier era, one which is already notorious for its alleged barbarism: the so-called “Dark Ages.”

ABOVE: René Descartes (1596 – 1650), considered one of the founders of the scientific method and greatest thinkers of modern times, lived during the height of the witchcraft hysteria.

Today, most historians explicitly reject the term “Dark Ages,” because it is really not an apt description for the Middle Ages and it conjures up a large number of inaccurate connotations. The truth is that every historical era has both desirable and undesirable elements; even in our own time, we are still plagued by wars and hardships. It would be a mistake to see the Age of Enlightenment any different.

Misconception #2: The people who conducted the witch trials were horrible barbarians. We are so much more sophisticated now.

This is probably the most widely believed misconception about the witch trials. Unfortunately, of all the misconceptions this article addresses, this one is undoubtedly the most dangerous. You see, the most disturbing aspect of the witch-trials is how sophisticated the people behind them were. In many cases, the judges who sentenced witches to death were highly-educated, literate, urban elites. Yet these people still believed in witches because that belief was so thoroughly entrenched into the culture in which they lived. The real lesson that everyone should take away from the witch trials is not that people used to be mindless savages, but rather that even highly intelligent and well-educated people can be driven by fear and mass hysteria to do things that they would ordinarily find unthinkable. None of us should consider ourselves immune from this tendency because the moment we forget our own fallibility is when we become most susceptible to the very hysteria that we consider ourselves immune to.

The destructive capacities of human unreason have been repeatedly demonstrated throughout the course of recent history and beliefs very similar to the dark delusions that fed the witch trials have continued to resurface, even in recent decades. Take the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s, which was first sparked in 1980 after the Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith published the memoir Michelle Remembers, which claimed that, under hypnosis therapy, Michelle had been able to recover previously lost memories of being ritually abused as a five-year-old girl in all manner of horrifying and salacious ways by members of a Satanic cult, which allegedly included her parents. Subsequent investigation by journalists into the events described in the book have since demonstrated the allegations contained within it to have been completely fabricated. Nonetheless, the book caused quite a stir at the time when it was first published.

In August 1983, explosive allegations were unleashed against the owners of McMartin Preschool in Manhatten Beach, California, claiming that they had sexually abused the children in their care in a variety of bizarre and extremely lurid Satanic rituals. In the absence of physical evidence, authorities came to rely heavily on personal testimony, especially testimony from young children, who are especially prone to suggestion from others. Interrogators often used extremely suggestive leading questions and would interrogate the same child multiple times until the child eventually admitted to having been sexually abused. Thus, even children who had initially denied ever having been abused could be coaxed into admitting that they had.

The children gave bizarre and often impossible testimony. Among the earliest claims was that Raymond Buckey, an employee at the daycare center, could fly using the power of Satan. Much of the supposed abuse was claimed to have taken place in secret tunnels underneath the school. Several excavations were conducted, which found no evidence to support the existence of such tunnels. Children gave reports of being flushed down toilets leading to secret rooms, where they were sexually abused, yet no excavations managed to turn up evidence of such rooms and the toilets at McMartin did not have large enough drains to actually flush a child down. Nonetheless, the trials persisted.

Obviously, these allegations sound absolutely ridiculous to any sane person today, but a survey conducted in the 1980s found that a full 70% of Americans believed that Satanic Ritual Abuse was a real occurrence. The McMartin trials were the most famous, but they were by no means the only trials. Dozens of daycare centers across the country were accused of participation in Satanic Ritual Abuse, which was widely believed to be part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by a supposed ancient, shadowy organization known as the “Church of Satan” (apparently different from the actual Church of Satan, which was only founded in 1966). By the end of the panic in the early 1990s, more than seventy people across the country had been falsely convicted of horrific crimes against children involving Satanic rituals. Eventually, all of these people were exonerated and released from prison, but, by that time, the damage had already been done. Some of them had already spent as long as two decades behind bars and they had already lost their homes, businesses, and reputations.

The McMartin trial lasted six years until it finally ended in 1990 with no one being convicted and all charges being dropped. It was the longest-running and most expensive trial in the entire history of the United States judicial system. Years later in 2005, Kyle Zirpolo, one of the children who had been coerced into giving testimony against the McMartins wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times apologizing for the testimony he had given, giving confirmation to what many experts had already suspected: the children were just making up accusations to please their parents and the people interrogating them. He wrote:

Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted. I know the types of language they used on me: things like I was smart, or I could help the other kids who were scared.

I felt uncomfortable and a little ashamed that I was being dishonest. But at the same time, being the type of person I was, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do. And I thought they wanted me to help protect my little brother and sister who went to McMartin.

The similarities between the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic and the witchcraft hysteria of a few centuries earlier are striking on almost every level. The use of personal testimony, especially from children, in the absence of physical evidence and the use of suggestive questioning during interrogation are all reminiscent of a witch trial. Even many of the specific allegations themselves can be directly traced back to Early Modern beliefs about witchcraft. The lurid descriptions of sexual rituals that were almost ubiquitous among Satanic Ritual Abuse allegations go all the way back to the Early Modern idea of a Witches’ Sabbath or Black Mass, in which witches were widely believed to engage in sexually depraved rituals with demons. Though certainly none of the children and probably none of the parents involved in making the accusations had read the Malleus Maleficarum, the similarities are almost uncanny.

ABOVE: Woodcut from 1508 by Hans Baldung, showing witches gathered in a woodland clearing

ABOVE: Woodcut from 1608 from  the Compedium Maleficarum by Francesco Maria Guazzo, showing witches in line to kiss the Devil’s anus as part of one of their alleged “Witches’ Sabbaths,” in which they were widely believed to engage in all kinds of depraved sexual acts with demons.

The Satanic Ritual Abuse panic began almost forty years ago and, while nothing quite on the same scale has happened in the United States since then, smaller incidences of mass hysteria demonstrate that the capacity for these kinds of panics has still not diminished. Starting in August 2016 and continuing until late October, people claimed to spot sinister-looking clowns bearing various weapons in unexpected locations. Most of these sightings turned out to either be completely fabricated or the result of hallucinations; others turned out to be merely pranks. Nonetheless, the panic managed to grip much of the nation, with the supposed “killer clowns” being spotted in every state.

In fall 2016, a fake news story circulated on the internet claiming that Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and other Democratic Party elites were running a secret child prostitution ring out of a Washington D. C. pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong. Despite how ludicrous this should sound to any reasonable person, it was believed by thousands of people at least and one man from North Carolina drove six hours to the pizza parlor with an AR-15 assault rifle. Thankfully, no one was injured. Obviously neither of these are anyway on the scale of Early Modern witch-trials, but they clearly demonstrate that human nature has not changed in the past 300 years. People are still capable of believing utter nonsense and acting on those beliefs in ways that are damaging to society.

Misconception #3: Witchcraft is mentioned in the Bible.

The concept of witchcraft as we think of it did not exist at the time when either the Old or New Testaments were being written. English translations of the Bible speak of “witches” and “witchcraft,” but these terms are anachronistic and highly misleading. There are a variety of terms in the Hebrew Bible that are commonly translated as “witch.” Most famous is the phrase mĕkaššēpâ, used in Exodus 22:18, which the NRSV translates as “You shall not permit a female sorcerer to live.” The word itself is both singular and feminine and it originally referred to a person who, in line with ancient Near Eastern traditions, was thought to place malevolent charms on people.

This may sound a lot like a witch to our ears, but it differs substantially from the early modern concept of a “witch.” In the ancient Near East, magic rituals were commonly used by people of all social statuses and all inclinations for all kinds of different reasons. (In using the word “magic” I do not mean to imply that these rituals were in any way effective, only that the people who performed them believed they were.) The peoples of the ancient Near East had no distinction between “light magic” and “dark magic”; a person who performed curses was simply someone who used the same magical rituals as everyone else, but for nefarious or selfish reasons. Therefore, a mĕkaššēpâ was simply an ordinary human being, who was not thought to derive her powers from demons.

The Greek word used in the New Testament that is commonly translated as “witchcraft” is φαρμακεία (pharmakeia), which actually refers to the use of drugs or potions for occult or otherwise sinister purposes. This same word is the root of our modern English words pharmacy and pharmaceuticals. The word pharmakeia occurs in Galatians 5:20 as part of a long list of the “works of the flesh.” It also occurs in Revelation 18:23 as part of the phrase “all nations were deceived by your pharmakeia,” which is usually translated as “all nations were deceived by your sorcery,” but would more accurately be translated as “all nations were deceived by your occult druggery.”

Misconception #4: The leaders of the witch-hunts were almost always clergy.

Rulers of all stripes prosecuted witches because witches were seen, not just as an abstract theological threat, but a very real and ever-present danger to everyone. Regardless of whether a ruler was devout, it was his duty to prevent witches from terrorizing his people.

Furthermore, secular leaders sometimes had their own, personal reasons for wanting to prosecute witches. King James VI of Scotland prosecuted more witches than any other Scottish monarch, yet he had a reputation for lack of piety and he was probably also a homosexual. Why did he have an interest in prosecuting so many witches, then? Well, King James also had a peculiar fascination (some might say obsession) with the occult. He would interrogate accused witches personally, hoping to find out about their secret rituals. In 1597, he even published a book titled Daemonologie in which he described and classified demons by rank and related in depth purported black magical practices, based in part on his findings from his many interrogations of witches. A few years later, William Shakespeare is believed to have used Daemonologie as one of his main sources for the spells in his play Macbeth.

ABOVE: Seventeenth-century woodcut of King James VI personally interrogating witches during the North Berwick witch trials (1590–1592). He later used information from these interrogation sessions to write a book on the occult entitled Daemonologie.

Misconception #5: All witches were burned at the stake.

Witches were only burned at the stake in Catholic countries. In Protestant countries, they were typically executed by other means. In Britain and the British colonies, convicted witches were almost always executed by hanging. Of the twenty people executed during the Salem witch trials, nineteen of them were hanged and one was pressed to death. Five others died in prison. The misconception about witches always being burned at the stake probably stems mostly from the fact that burning at the stake is a far more horrifying and dramatic means of execution than merely hanging someone, so it tends to stick better in people’s minds. Another possible reason why this misconception is so prevalent may be because nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians writing in the English language were fond of telling and retelling stories of Catholic cruelty, while downplaying or omitting tales of Englishmen and other Protestants engaging in similar acts of barbarism. Thus, Catholic witch-burnings made it into the history books more frequently than English witch-hangings.

ABOVE: Illustration by Johann Jacob Wick depicting the burning of three convicted witches at the stake in Baden, Switzerland in 1585. Despite the iconic status that witch-burnings have attained in popular culture, in many countries, convicted witches were actually hanged, not burned.

Misconception #6: The Salem witch trials were the largest witch trials.

The Salem witch trials are probably the most famous witch trials to most Americans today. They are the ones everyone has heard of and the ones that are always referenced in popular culture. As I explained in the previous section, however, the Salem witch trials resulted in the deaths of a grand total of only twenty-five people. This may seem like a lot of people to us, but it is nothing compared to the masses of people who were executed in the much larger European witch trials of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The only reason why the Salem witch trials are so famous is because they were the only major series of witch trials to occur in the English colonies in North America and are therefore the only witch trials taught in American history classes. The vast majority of the witch trials, however, actually occurred in Europe and some of those trials were much, much larger. During the North Berwick trials in Scotland (1590–1592), somewhere between seventy and 200 people were arrested under accusations of witchcraft. Many of them were executed, although it is unknown exactly how many.

The Trier witch trials in Germany (1581–1593) resulted in the executions of approximately 368 people. The Fulda witch trials (1603–1606) resulted in the executions of approximately 250 people. The Bamberg witch trials (1626–1631) outdid all of them; they resulted in approximately 1,000 executions. That means roughly forty times as many people died in the Bamberg witch trials alone than in the Salem ones and yet hardly anyone in this country has even heard of them!

Misconception #7: All people accused of witchcraft were women.

While the majority of those accused of witchcraft in western Europe and North America were indeed female, males always made up a sizable minority. Of the twenty people executed during the Salem witch trials, fourteen of them were female and six of them were male. In some parts of Scandinavia and northern Europe during certain time periods, men actually made up the majority of the accused. The witch trials were not a “women’s Holocaust” as some people have claimed. Although the witch trials disproportionately targeted women, women were far from the only victims.

Misconception #8: The Catholic Church was solely responsible for the witch-trials.

Actually, both Catholics and Protestants prosecuted people for witchcraft. Protestant leaders certainly did not object to it. The people of Salem were Puritans, meaning they were die-hard Calvinists. The only reason why the Catholic Church has received such inordinately large blame for the witch-trials is because, for the past four hundred years, all history books in English were written by Protestants, who were eager to blame everything on the Catholic Church. Do not worry, though; the Catholics were no nicer to Protestants and, if you read history books in Spanish, for instance, the Protestants are the ones who come off looking like monsters. In truth, both parties are equally to blame.

Misconception #9: Clergy and judges almost universally supported and even promoted the witch-trials.

In actuality, many judges and clergy alike hated witch-trials because they were notoriously far more complicated than ordinary trials and the evidence seemed almost impossible to prove. There were some members of the clergy and the judiciary who relentlessly hunted witches, such as, most famously, Johann Georg Fuchs von Dornheim, the Prince-Bishop of Bamberg who became known as the Hexenbrenner (“Burner of Witches”) due to his brutal promulgation of the notorious Bamberg witch trials, but these fanatics were the exception, not the rule.

ABOVE: Johann Georg Fuchs von Dornheim, the Prince-Bishop of Bamberg behind the Bamberg witch trials, known as the Hexenbrenner for his notoriously brutal policies against witchcraft. He is believed to have executed between 300 and 600 accused witches, including the mayor of Bamberg himself.

Virtually all people of the time period believed in witchcraft and believed it was a serious threat, but otherwise attitudes tended to vary greatly from person to person, often depending on the time and place in which the person lived. In times of peace, it was rare for an accused witch to even be brought to trial because accusations were commonly dismissed as unfounded. During times of strife and turmoil, however, the stakes were higher and executions were more common. (The Bamberg witch trials, for instance, took place during the Thirty Years’ War and the Salem Witch trials took place just fourteen years after the Puritan colonies and their farms were devastated by King Philip’s War.)

Misconception #10: The “witches” being prosecuted were actually practitioners of a pagan nature religion devoted to a horned male deity that survived in hiding from antiquity and the Christians wanted to exterminate.

This sound ridiculous, I know, but, believe it or not, there are people who actually believe it and enough of them that I feel it is necessary to mention here. This notion was first proposed by German historians of religion in the late nineteenth century, but it was popularized by and has become most closely associated with a woman named Margaret Murray (1863–1963), who first wrote about it in her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. She elaborated on her hypothesis in The God of the Witches, published ten years later.

Murray’s arguments were based on a highly selective, literal reading of the confessions extracted from accused witches. Her approach was extraordinarily naïve at best and her hypothesis was never accepted by mainstream historians. In spite of this, she exerted massive influence on popular culture, impacting the novels of John Buchan and Robert Graves. Her ideas also formed part of the foundation for the new religion of Wicca, founded by Gerald Gardner in the 1940s, which claimed to be a remnant of the witch-cult persecuted by Christians during the witch-trials.

ABOVE: Margaret Murray, the most prominent proponent of the “witch-cult hypothesis,” a baseless pseudohistorical narrative which claims that the “witches” prosecuted during the witch-trials were actually believers in a prehistoric nature religion.

The problems with Murray’s argument are manifold. Her first problem is the most obvious; she took the confessions extracted from accused witches at face value, apparently not realizing that an innocent person will confess to nearly anything after being tortured and interrogated long enough. Her second problem is her selectivity. She only accepted the testimonies that seemed to support her hypothesis and ignored ones that did not, ignoring the fact that witchcraft testimonies vary drastically depending on geography and the beliefs of the people in the region and that even reports from the same region are often contradictory.

The witch-cult hypothesis is not only wrong, but it is also damaging to social relations because it is often used in a deeply divisive ideological context. Many Wiccans still refer to the Middle Ages as the “Burning Times,” believing that, during that era, practitioners of their religion were brutally and systematically hunted down and mercilessly burned at the stake by fanatical Christian zealots. This worldview has shaped many of these Wiccans’ attitudes towards Christians, leading them to see all Christians as inherently hateful and intolerant, which is a deeply inaccurate image.

Thankfully, the witch-cult hypothesis and the “Burning Times” myth were never fully accepted by all Wiccans and are gradually starting to die out among many covens, due to improving education on the actual history of the witch trials and of the Wiccan religion.

Summary

I know I have said a lot in this post, so here is quick recap:

1. The witch-trials actually happened in the Early Modern Period (c. 1492–c. 1763), not the Middle Ages (c. 476–c. 1492), but people like to imagine that they happened during the Middle Ages because they like to pretend that the Early Modern Period was an era of widespread philosophical enlightenment and rational, scientific inquiry and that the Middle Ages were a time of unrelenting brutality and barbarism, an image that is oversimplistic at best.
2. The proponents of the witch-trials were not merely stupid barbarians, but often highly intelligent and well-educated individuals driven by fear and mass hysteria. Events strikingly similar to the witch-trials have even occurred in recent decades.
3. Words translated as “witchcraft” in most Bible translations often originally had other meanings.
4. Secular rulers supported the witch-trials for various, often personal, reasons.
5. Methods of executing witches varied from country to country; in many countries, they were hanged, not burned at the stake as they are commonly portrayed in popular culture.
6. The Salem witch trials were actually relatively minor compared to the deadliest European witch trials of previous centuries, some of which had death tolls in the hundreds or even, in one case, allegedly the thousands.
7. Most victims of the witch-trials were women, but men were often victims as well.
8. Witch-trials occurred in both Catholic and Protestant lands and were not confined to any particular region.
9. Support for the witch trials waxed and waned depending on social conditions and accusations of witchcraft were often dismissed out of hand during times of relative peace and prosperity, but were generally taken more seriously during times of war, hardship, and social instability.
10. While thousands of people were indeed killed in the witch-hunts, they were not a systematic persecution of practitioners of a prehistoric pagan sect, but rather instances of mass hysteria.