Now, about those witches and those who burned them...

[fpb]

The Editrix, a two-fisted, pugnacious, opinionated blogger from Germany whom I could almost make an honorary Italian for her stubborn individuality - and with whom I have had some vigorous disagreements - published on one of her blogs an article so important that I asked her permission to republish it whole. Here it is:

Nine Million Women or: No Lie Is Quite Too Dirty

I oppose the term "Femi-Nazi" because it is a-historic and blurs the borders between two different phenomena. However, sometimes I am stunned by the affinity of certain totalitarian world views... At a time where Christians are killed by Muslims, copiously in the Third World and, yet and just, separately elsewhere and both without much interest from public and media, where the world got its collective knickers in a knot that the pope is Catholic, the following from the information site "Katholisches – Magazin für Kirche und Kultur" is of particular importance. "Katholisches" (which means something like "Catholic matters") introduces a book "Toleranz und Gewalt ("Tolerance and Violence") and forwards some details about the dreaded Inquisition, evil incarnate and second only to the 20th century Holocaust of the Jews (if that), in a historical context: Informationen und Zahlen über die Heilige Inquisition aus dem Buch "Toleranz und Gewalt".

According to that book, the Spanish Inquisition has, within the 160 years between 1540 and 1700, passed 44,674 sentences. Of those sentenced, 826 were executed. The book compares this to the Spanish Civil war, where Communists murdered within a time span of six years more than 7,000 priests and monastics. The Roman Inquisition had, between 1542 and 1761, exactly 97 people executed. Another example: Secular jurisdiction executed within the same time span 939 people in the city of Nürnberg alone.

Burning of witches was almost unknown and strictly rejected by the popes. In the 17th century, when all over the Protestant regions north of the Alps the stakes were burning (there is an estimation of 25,000 victims), not a single witch trial was performed. In Spain, about 300 "witches" were burnt at the stakes, in strongly Catholic Ireland 2.

The frequently traded number of 9 million victims can, interestingly, be traced back to Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in the "Third Reich", who intended to fuel thus anti-Catholic resentments. In fact, even his "research team" couldn't fabricate more than 30,000 victims.
Thanks to feminism, the history of the European witch hunts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries has become ideologized and bent out of shape to their liking and, interestingly, 9 million is the number incorrectly and widely bandied about. While witch hunts were seen in the early 1900s as outbreaks of religious hysteria for which an ever-sinister and oppressive Catholic church was responsible, in the Seventies, feminist revisionist historians claimed that they had been a systematic campaign by the patriarchal system to do away with the remnants of -- Yeah, right! -- goddess-worshiping pre-Christian religions.

While both concepts are wrong, somewhat predictably, the more idiotic one has prevailed. As Laura Miller puts it in Salon.com:
For a summary of this now-widespread misperception of the "Burning Times," we need look no further than a passage from the best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code": "The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. 'Malleus Maleficarum' -- or 'The Witches' Hammer' -- indoctrinated the world to 'the dangers of freethinking women' and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture and destroy them. Those deemed 'witches' by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women 'suspiciously attuned to the natural world.' Midwives were also killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth -- a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During 300 years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women" [internal quotations original, source unidentified, but definitely not "Malleus Maleficarum"].

This is an impressively erroneous passage, incorrect almost from beginning to end, but it is contaminated by one morsel of fact: The "Malleus Maleficarum" is indeed a spectacularly misogynistic and twisted book, compiled by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, published in 1486 and an essential guidebook and inspiration for witch hunters throughout Europe.

For many years, such volumes of demonology ("findings" on the behavior of demons, witches and their master, the devil) were the main sources for historians of Europe's witch hunts, including such revisionist feminist historians as Margaret Murray and Anne Llewellyn Barstow. The trouble is, demonology texts like "Malleus Maleficarum" -- alarmist calls to arms in a society where many people were skeptical about the threat posed by witches -- amount to advertisements and arguments for the profession of witch hunting. When it comes to what actually happened in the real world, they're about as trustworthy as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In the past two or three decades, however, many historians have turned their attention to more reliable source materials on the witch hunts -- the local records of trials and executions stashed away in hundreds of small towns across Europe and Great Britain. As the historian Jenny Gibbons has pointed out in her admirably lucid 1998 essay "Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt," this is hard work, sifting through vast amounts of dull documents written in archaic and often frustratingly obtuse language, but it's the sort of thing real historians do.
Let me repeat: That's the sort of thing real historians do.

No doubt, the knowledge thus retrieved painted a somewhat different picture of Europe's witch hunts and at the end of the day, it was what we all know anyway because people do not change that much. Petty feuds among neighbors, resentments within families, disagreeable local characters, the schemes of power hungry public figures big and small and the disgusting psychosexual interests we know in various forms all anyway. The quotation of the phenomenon Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil" is very apt indeed.

Interestingly, too, some 20 percent of the European average of those tried for witchcraft were men. In some cases, the accused were children. Now try to get that in line with the evil patriarchy.

As indicated in the excerpt of my other blog entry quoted above, the Inquisition was not greatly involved in witch burnings. It was rather a matter of the Protestant sub-culture and while the justification for witch trials was religious, the trials were not performed by churches of ANY denomination, but held in civil courts and prosecuted by local authorities as criminal cases. It shouldn't be forgotten, either, that the power vacuum that developed through the fragmentation of political and legal powers in Germany in the post-Reformation era, made it possible for panics like witch hunts to get their own momentum, when all kinds of moral fundamentalism, that saw the Devil's hand at work in all opponents, run rampant.

In her book "Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany" Lyndal Roper explains in detail that Germany in the late 16th century was a place where marriage and children were difficult to attain because of the estate system and laws that prevented people from marrying unless they could prove that they could support a family, and where illegitimate pregnancies were outlawed and harshly punished. To be a wife and mother was thus a privileged station in life and the target of envy, the base for many accusations of sorcery and witchcraft, different from the political correct history that tries to sell us that witch hunts were organized campaigns by a patriarchial society and a church hell-bent on eliminating all "ancient wisdom". But married women and mothers were by far not the sole targets. When all else is said and done, there are always women who will begrudge other women even their eyesight, and so, somewhat predictably, the cases Roper quotes suggest the opposite to the evil patriarchy scheme, namely that the chief accusers, and the initiating force behind the trials against women, were often -- women, and that the pagan cultures, so glorified in many feminist and "alternative" circles, have, what little records they have left, proven to be every bit as capable of misogyny and brutalizing outsiders and misfits. To summarize: Pagans were no better than Christians, women no better than men and village communities no better than any other human society.
A gift of baked goods that comes with a barbed remark about the recipient's own culinary skills, a quarrel over the price of apples, irritation at someone who doesn't come promptly to dinner when called -- these are the sorts of incidents that precipitated the hideous cruelty of Europe's witch hunts. "It is difficult to comprehend the sheer viciousness of the way villagers and townsfolk attacked those they held to be witches," Roper writes. Then again, if you've ever lived in a small community, is it really that difficult to see how they got started in that direction, if not how they managed to get so far? It may take a village to raise a child, but history also keeps telling us that it takes a village to burn a witch.
So Laura Miller.

Although all that is something anybody with a modicum of common sense knows anyway, there remains a feeling of weird awe towards those women who turn the truth upside down and inside out, who abuse historiograpy to their own twisted ends and who do not shy away from even the most debased of libels and lies, not even those fabricated by a Heinrich Himmler, one of the most effective mass murderers in history.

Comments

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

A good essay. It's pretty much what I remember reading in Rodney Stark's chapter on the witchhunts in his book, For the Glory of God a few years ago. However, I still can't pursuade any of my feminist/pagan friends to take a different look at the evidence. They remain convinced the Inquisition was the first Holocaust.

Could you provide the link to the original blog? I think I'd like to ask this woman if I could re-post her article, too.


[BTW, you seem to have an HTML mark-up error. I think the end-tag on the link to the Wiki article is missing.]

[fpb.livejournal.com]

http://themostdestructivesinglecause.blogspot.com/2009/07/nine-million-women-or-no-lie-is-quite.html?showComment=1278521550349#c4782963946231496810

This is one of three different blogs by the same person (plus one in German), this one against feminists and feminism. And beware! You think I am polemical? Compared with her, I am a cuddly kitty-cat. But she is upright and can be charming.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

First I have to tell you that I couldn't read most of the first couple of paragraphs, the html is seriously borked. Moving on--

This is a very interesting article. If you read accounts of the witch trials of Salem (those in particular were taught in a lot of schools over here), most of the accusers were women, including women accusing men of witchcraft. Also, the line about living in a small community is so true. I spent most of my high school years living in a town of less than 300 people, and I'm here to tell ya, it sucked.
Whenever I'd heard or read that figure of 9 million 'witches' executed, it always seemed really out of proportion to me. The population of Europe in the middle ages just wasn't that huge, 9 million people is approaching the numbers killed by the Plague. If that number were true, it's amazing there were any people left.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

People who repeat that bit of nonsense usually add "over 500 years" or the like, which is also nonsense, because organized witch-hunting began in the fifteenth century and was over by the eighteenth. And it still is nonsense even so.

The mistakes have been corrected. There are now working links.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mind. I'm going to link to this entry.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I noticed. I am quite happy (and the write-up you gave me did not displease me either!) 8-)

[dadadadio.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was a serious butt smooch he gave you. ;)

This is an interesting subject I know little about. Now I know more. I have a pagan friend who will certainly read this.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

So you managed to insult both affablestranger and myself in the most repulsive manner imaginable, in only one sentence. Well, now I know what to expect from you - and from any friend of yours - and you and your pagan friend can kiss my arse.

[dadadadio.livejournal.com]

No offense was intended. I enjoyed the essay.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

In that case, and for future remembrance, please understand that most people do not regard "that was a serious butt smooch he gave you" as a compliment. It implies ugly servility on affablestranger's side, and repulsive complacency on mine. I hope I do not sink so low, and I KNOW he does not.

[dadadadio.livejournal.com]

I was meant in jest. He did promote you and this blog rather heavily and suggested no one debate you on the topic unless they had clear knowledge of the issue at hand.

Our senses of humor are an obvious mismatch.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, I don't insult others under cover of jest. Should I ever happen to insult you, for instance, you will know that I meant it.

[sharpchick.livejournal.com]

9 million is a little over the top.

But if this is supposed to be an essay upon an essay about the burning (and hanging and "pressing" - a form of torture using rocks placed up on a person in a supine position to make them confess to being a witch) of people accused of being witches, then it misses the mark because it completely leaves out King James I's obsession with persecution of witches (do unto others *before* they do unto you) - not all women, btw - which seems to have been spawned by his attendance at the North Berwick witch trials in Scotland. He later wrote a little ditty called, Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogie, Diuided into three Bookes. By James Rx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemonologie) in 1597.

I am the pagan friend of dadadadio, although my personal preference is spiritualist, and I more closely follow the traditions of my Native ancestors of the southeast United States, who to this day, still experience persecution because their own spiritual practices do not dovetail with those of the Catholic or any other Abrahamic tradition.

And I have no intention of kissing your ass...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

In case you hadn't noticed, King James was not Catholic. Not even close (he was the intended target of the Gunpowder Plot). And Scotland itself is a matter apart, one of the areas where cruelty and fanaticism were most savagely unleashed - again, not a Catholic country. As for "being persecuted" in the twenty-first century USA - I am not buying that bridge. You have no idea what persecution means. If you had been a Christian in third-century Egypt, or in twenty-first century Pakistan for that matter, you would not waste such a word on such a reality.

P.S.: there is no such thing as Abrahamic tradition.

[sharpchick.livejournal.com]

The essay to which you cite discusses witch trials in Europe, not exclusively Catholic nations. It also confuses witches with pagans, witches being only a minority of the people who identify as pagan. Abrahamic traditions are comprised of the world's three primary monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

I respectfully suggest you narrow your paintbrush and broaden your scope of theological reading material if you are truly on a campaign for accuracy. Otherwise what appears to be a rant against revisionist history actually perpetuates it.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This discussion is going nowhere. There were no pagans in 16th-century Europe, apart from a few aristocratic faddists in Florence, and if you think otherwise, that means that you are fed on pseudo-history that no self-respecting historian - and I don't mean Christians, I mean Marxists like Christopher Hill or agnostics like GR Elton or Keith Thomas - would touch with a barge-pole. Nothing makes sense in European history from the tenth to the seventeenth century until you understand that all popular movements, however subversive, HAD to be Christian, because the people simply did not understand any other way of thinking. They had none. So even visitations as brutal and destructive as Hussitism and Muenster Anabaptism made their claims in Christian terms. From the First Crusade - which was the first great popular movement in the modern Western mode - to the American Revolution, preached from the same pulpits that had heard the thunder of Whitfield thirty years earlier, seven centuries of popular movements kept calling on the same God and the same Christ. There was no popular movement until the French Revolution that made any claim that did not depend on the books of Christianity for its validation, however fraudulent. You have been reading trash and your understanding - so to call it - of European history is pickled in trash. And that being the case, I have nothing to say to you, except to try and realize that you know nothing that has any claim to be true.

[dadadadio.livejournal.com]

There were no pagans in 16th-century Europe?

You must be joking. Did you travel in time to reach this conclusion or refer to one of your history books to find this undeniable truth? ... as if the concept of truth exists in history books written by man.

You confuse sharpchick's approach to the issue as being Euro-centric. I suspect she takes a wider view of this topic. If reading opposing opinion is within your ability you might check her reply to your burning times point of view in her blog.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are the kind of idiot who believes that any opinion is as good as another, and that you are under obligation to respect opinions, but not people. You are also quite uneducated and incapable of reading an argument. The reason to say that there were no pagains in 16th-century Europe is there in my argument and you could have found it there if you knew how to read: namely, that every popular movement from the Crusades to the American Revolution claimed its legitimacy in terms of Christian ideas. No movement before the French Revolution ever managed to have any legitimacy before the people who made it up unless it claimed to represent "true" Christianity; and that is even those movements which, like Catharism, were in effect not Christian at all. The Cathars taught that they were the "true Church", and that was how they found proselytes. The American revolutionaries called on "Nature's God", "the Creator", "the God of Battles" (Patrick Henry), "Providence", etc etc. Until the mid-eighteenth century, it was impossible for anyone in Europe and its colonies abroad to legitimate himself except in Christian terms. If you want to try and prove otherwise, try it. Else shut up. As for saying that someone who is talking about European history is "Euro-centric" - if you don't realize that you have spoken utter and grossly ludicrous nonsense, you are beyond help.

[dadadadio.livejournal.com]

I took the time to read many of your blog posts. Interesting.

It must be difficult knowing everything about the history of mankind, ever single soul on this planet for thousands of years, and being subjected to the ignorance of mere plebs.

No, I don't consider every opinion as good as another. I recognize rubbish when I see it, but I also don't pretend to have the vast knowledge and life experience you porport to have when the truth is, you're extremely narrow minded and arrogant.

Your feeble attempts at insult (throughout your blog) and banning of users with opposing opinion disqualify you from being what another LJ user referred you as, an intelligent academic. You lack the open minded approach a true academic employs in the quest for enlightenment.

You should stop pretending. It's quite pathetic.

Enjoy the World Cup final. It should be an entertaining match if the officials don't spoil it.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And some day you might actually post an answer, instead of some nasty little rhapsody about your own moral superiority? Ah, but that would require work. Even worse, it might subject your position to further responses, and we don't want that, do we? It's so hurtful to be answered back, especially when it is done without the proper amount of genuflection to your innate excellence. Well, I am sorry, I am so so so sorry, that I upset you by posting about things I knew; I am even sorrier, even so so so sorrier, that that turned out to be one or two things more than you know. The number of things I don't know is infinite, and I don't discuss things I don't know - in which I am, I know, a sport, a bizarreness, an outright annoyance. It seems to have become law, but how or when I don't know, that people are entitled to have opinions on matters of which they are blindly ignorant; and, what is more, that they have an absolute right not to be corrected, criticized or mocked for this. Well, I stand by the opposing view - if you are ignorant in a subject, don't pretend to have an opinion, and if you do, remember that it is under correction. It's not my fault that I enjoy reading and finding things out. I recommend it to you; you might find it a pleasing pastime. And it certainly beats inventing hollow verbal procedures to pretend to a superiority you don't have.

P.S.: about the final -

[fpb.livejournal.com]

- shows how much you know about football. It is pretty rare that a really high-stakes game turns out to be interesting; most of the time both sides are more nervous of losing than committed to winning. Many games of this kind end up in penalties. The best playing is usually seen in league-type competitions and friendlies, when you aren't staking everything on one game.

Re: P.S.: about the final -

[dadadadio.livejournal.com]

I'm aware of the anticlimactic nature of championship finales. It's a common theme in many sports. This does not prevent me from hoping for a well played tightly contested match.

I've enjoyed the world cup. It's been highly entertaining. I had hoped for a better showing for the U.S. but feel they played as well as they were capable of. I don't pretend know a great deal about football having not grown up with the game. I simply enjoy the sport, unlike many of my countrymen. This starts by giving it a chance.

The game is growing here but there will always be a segment of this sporting population finding it boring. They can't be helped. Many feel the same about my game of baseball.

Re: P.S.: about the final -

[fpb.livejournal.com]

OK, I take that particular remark back and apologize.

[sharpchick.livejournal.com]

Oh my...have you informed all the historians that they simply must lop the UK off the historic 16th century maps of Europe? A name for reference to the land mass that, btw, was changed from Christendom to the name of a female character in a Greek myth.

If there were no pagans in 16th century Europe, there would have been no need for the Witchcraft Acts of 1542 and 1563.

I realize that does not fit in with your paradigm of spiritual traditions. But it's documented in history, whether you care to acknowledge it or not.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Witches weren't pagans. The charges brought, the confessions obtained, and the evidence presented, was fully in terms of Protestant demonology - I invite you to read Cotton Mather's unbelievably obstinate tracts, which actually twisted Calvinist Satanism to argue that the Devil (who is a wholly Christian character) could make himself unconscious of his own existence the better to deceive his followers! And that, mind you, was supposed to be the reason why so many accused witches were certain of their own innocence! If you had the slightest idea of any kind of paganism - Teutonic, Celtic, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, anything - you would know that this simply is no part of it. It is a spectacularly perverted kind of bookish Calvinism, and one of the reasons why most Christians loathe Calvinism. I personally don't believe that any of them were even witches; the evidence is too strong that the whole thing was a collective piece of lunacy, visited, as such things inevitably are, on unpopular people or personal enemies. Maybe you seriously believe that the victims of the Salem hysteria were "guilty as charged"? And you still insist on Protestant England and its paranoid ruling class, which was fighting a civil war when those "acts" were passed. You are incapable of contextualizing, ignorant of contemporary events, you have never made anything like a credible study of events; or else it would never occur to you to answer an article which was a defence of the Catholic Church, and specifically of the Papacy, with the deeds of Protestant fanatics who would gladly have burned suspected witches and suspected Catholics together!

And I have to spend my time answering this kind of thing.

[sharpchick.livejournal.com]

Witches weren't pagans.

Now, you are simply out of your sphere of knowledge, and quite frankly in serious danger of embarassing yourself.

Latin 101 is my recommendation.

And you are right - this is not productive dialogue. Productive dialogue necessarily implies that each party entertains, and then in contemplation of response, actually engages in study of the viewpoint expressed by the other. You are simply too hamstrung by your own version of the truth to venture out and take a look.

And certainly, I would not want you to feel compelled to spend your time responding to this. I'm sure you have bigger fish to fry.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

When you start from a position of ignorance reinforced by quackery - like, say, someone whose idea of science comes from creationist tracts - then there is no treating your arguments with respect. Get it into your mind that the trash you have read is trash. As for teaching me Latin - why not teach your grandmother to suck eggs, while you're at it!

If you come to my blog demanding an answer, you will get one. If you don't like it, tough.

[sharpchick.livejournal.com]

It must be difficult being you. You have my momentary sympathy.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, no. actually it's not. But I can see why you would think so. Ignorance and pseudery do give one a certain kind of undeserved confidence.

[dadadadio.livejournal.com]

Reading is wonderful, but everything we read must be put in perspective. You certainly don't believe everything you read. And I suspect you seek material you have interest in and find agreeable. You label everything else as trash, under what authority?

History written by men is subjected to the bias and prejudice of man. It's revised again and again by men attempting to mold the 'truth' to fit their belief system. Humans are terribly imperfect in the documentation of events. There is no absolute truth unless you witness an event for yourself.

The Bible and other religious text are the primary sources of many historian's bias. Do you believe the Koran is trash?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Bla bla bla. Of course some books are better than others. I have in my library stuff whose author I would like to shake hard, but which is useful because of the material it contains. But there is a difference between even decent error, error that is aware of the issues, and quackery. I may think that Ian Kershaw wrote better on Hitler than, say, Lothar Machtan; I do not share Machtan's conclusions, but I do admit that he raised some very pertinent points. But both Kershaw and Machtan are on another level as compared to, say, David Irving. Irving is a quack. And the worst thing is that he is a quack with the potential of being something else. What, except a really vicious inner twist, can possibly justify his ignoring of millions of pages of evidence, and his attemtp to use a few, feeble misreading to disprove what everyone in Europe knows to have been true since 1945? There is hardly a family in continental Europe that has not had victims at the hands of the Nazis (including mine); how could Irving possibly hope to rewrite facts so widely testified, tried, and proved? A quack is someone who writes outside reality, and that is the problem with dealing with them. Anyone who comes to tell me that there were huge bodies of Pagans in Europe after the eleventh century is too ignorant to know what evidence is, how facts are established, how research is done. Period.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

stultos nihil nisi stultitiam ex libris et studiis capessunt; quia Camenae nihil donant, quod mortales non iam in se habent.

Don't bother looking for it anywhere. I just made it myself. But it describes my view of your plight pretty well.

[amonseuldesir.livejournal.com]

Interesting essay (and comments...)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

They are getting more and more interesting. Not that I mean that as a compliment. (And I don't mean it for you either. One day we can talk about the status of Jews...)