Robert Baird
Paranormal Maven
Exorcisms and the 'Burning times'
Have you heard about saving people? Yep. You too can be 'saved' and live in Heaven. There are many ways to get rid of your demons. You sometimes can choose or buy your way into a different category of being saved. I have no evidence of a price list and I suspect it has a lot to do with the marketing axiom "Whatever the market will bear." I know the Catholics still get loads of "special dispensatory" income and "confessional" revenue for services rendered. That includes estates and wills that are sometimes written by the godly priest for the illiterate Alzheimer's patient. They are after all the only professional exorcists - they claim.
All disease was said to be a result of sins and demons at one point in time (before Paracelsus and even after he revived medical science) and the official church position is still somewhat unclear. It is not enough to have the Catholic Encyclopedia as your source even though it is Nihil Obstat and other high-falutin verbiage (or is that garbiage). The local bishop was heard to say the Pope was losing his mind in 1999 when the Pope said there was no Heaven or Hell. This site says exorcisms are similarly in limbo (get it?).
The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel A.K.A Emily Rose - Catholic ...
forums.catholic.com › Forums › Catholic Living › Spirituality
Aug 28, 2008 - 15 posts - 8 authors
The Church does not grant exorcisms without being 100% sure of the facts. .... It seems difficult to find an official "Church position" on whether or ..."
But let us examine the period before concubinage was outlawed and even before the Church declared all priests were celibate in order to make it impossible for any of their administration to will an estate to a child of their blood. BTW which do you think was first? Did they outlaw sex with concubines after they outlawed sex? Let us go back to the outlawed Malleus Maleficarum and other burning of books (Hitler had learned this lesson as a good Catholic should when they celebrated the burning of books - and his minions saw another use of incinerators later on.). But before I start putting history into the thread let me add a little levity.
It is not true that those days were much different than today. Yes, during the dark ages the church was a factor but the practice of keeping power and knowledge to oneself or their group has good reason; and existed long before there even were churches. The first law of the Magi is Know, Will, Dare, Keep Silent or Scrire, Potere, Audere and I leave out the Keep Silent since the opening of the atomic gates. Pythagoras and Socrates wrote nothing - not because they had nothing to say.
So why not share power and knowledge? I give you one thing or time to consider. The Cathars freed women to be the equal of men, they had free education and free medicine. Their source of great wealth includes secret trade to the Americas but if one reads my work on Berenguer Sauniere they will find another possibility. So with all this going on you might expect a little turmoil from the average personages who enjoyed status quo. But even with the backing of the Alumbrados (Illuminati and De Medici or Benjaminites as well as Templars) they were burned at the stake and had to flee their land to go to the Balkans as the Bogomils or America later as the Huguenots under the auspices of the Merovingian John Jacob Astor.
When 250,000 men, women and children singing songs to the living love of Jesus (which means The Brotherhood of Man and is a title) were burned by Simon de Montfort and the Hounds of Hell a large number of knowledgeable people got first hand initiation to the second law of the Magi - As Above, So Below. I jest truly.
It also isn't just secrets that need to be considered. Throughout time there have been access to information issues such as do people actually read or care to learn after having the joy of learning drummed out of them by churches or parents who know so little about things themselves. Here is Bertrand Russell talking about Mass Psychology which includes religious seers pontificating and being listened to by the great unwashed. “I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.”
Today the same stuff happens in other ways. Malcolm Muggeridge observed that if Jesus were alive today he would be institutionalized or kept in a drugged state. Yes, people are threatened by knowledge because true knowledge carries great responsibility. Most people prefer ignorance even though it is not blissful there is peace of mind when one does not feel the pain of having enough knowledge to know things are not right. That leads to the third law of the Magi and my favorite. RIGHT THOUGHT = RIGHT ACTION.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. - H.L. Mencken
"The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.” – Thomas Jefferson
As this author says (somewhat tongue in cheek) all books of the Bible and this cult are corrupt. Savior = save your ($$)
The Truth Contest | What is the Ultimate Truth?
From: The Dark Side of Christian History
by Helen Ellerbe
The Reformation did not convert the people of Europe to orthodox Christianity through preaching and catechisms alone. It was the 300 year period of witch-hunting from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, what R.H. Robbins called "the shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of western civilization." The Church created the elaborate concept of devil worship and then, used the persecution of it to wipe out dissent, subordinate the individual to authoritarian control, and openly denigrate women.
The witch hunts were an eruption of orthodox Christianity's vilification of women, "the weaker vessel," in St. Peter's words. The second century St. Clement of Alexandria wrote: "Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman." The Church father Tertullian explained why women deserve their status as despised and inferior human beings:
"And do you not know that you are an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert that is, death even the Son of God had to die."
Others expressed the view more bluntly. The sixth century Christian philosopher, Boethius, wrote in The Consolation of Philosophy, "Woman is a temple built upon a sewer." Bishops at the sixth century Council of Macon voted as to whether or not women had souls. In the tenth century Odo of Cluny declared, "To embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure..." The thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas suggested that God had made a mistake in creating woman: "nothing [deficient] or defective should have been produced in the first establishment of things; so woman ought not to have been produced then." And Lutherans at Wittenberg debated whether women were really human beings at all. Orthodox Christians held women responsible for all sin. As the Bible's Apocrypha states, "Of woman came the beginning of sin And thanks to her, we all must die."
Women are often understood to be impediments to spirituality in a context where God reigns strictly from heaven and demands a renunciation of physical pleasure. As I Corinthians 7:1 states, "It is a good thing for a man to have nothing to do with a woman." The Inquisitors who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, "The Hammer of the Witches," explained that women are more likely to become witches:
'Because the female sex is more concerned with things of the flesh than men;' because being formed from a man's rib, they are only 'imperfect animals' and 'crooked' whereas man belongs to a privileged sex from whose midst Christ emerged.
Christians found fault with women on all sorts of counts. An historian notes that thirteenth century preachers
...denounced women on the one hand for... the lascivious and carnal provocation of their garments, and on the other hand for being over- industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give due thought to divine things.
As reformational fervor spread, the feminine aspect of Christianity in the worship of Mary became suspect. Throughout the Middle Ages, Mary's powers were believed to effectively curtail those of the devil. But Protestants entirely dismissed reverence for Mary while reformed Catholics diminished her importance. Devotion to Mary often became indicative of evil. In the Canary islands, Aldonca de Vargas was reported to the Inquisition after she smiled at hearing mention of the Virgin Mary. Inquisitors distorted an image of the Virgin Mary into a device of torture, covering the front side of a statue of Mary with sharp knives and nails. Levers would move the arms of the statue crushing the victim against the knives and nails.
The witch hunts also demonstrated great fear of female sexuality. The book that served as the manual for understanding and persecuting witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, describes how witches were known to "collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest..." The manual recounts a story of a man who, having lost his penis, went to a witch to have it restored:
She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to a parish priest.
A man in 1621 lamented, "of women's unnatural, unsatiable lust... what country, what village doth not complain."
While most of what became known as witchcraft was invented by Christians, certain elements of witchcraft did represent an older pagan tradition. Witchcraft was linked and even considered to be synonymous with "divination," which means not only the art of foretelling the future, but also the discovery of knowledge by the aid of supernatural power. It suggests that there is such power available- something orthodox Christians insisted could only be the power of the devil, for God was no longer to be involved with the physical world.
The word "witch" comes from the old English wicce and wicca, meaning the male and female participants in the ancient pagan tradition which holds masculine, feminine and earthly aspects of God in great reverence. Rather than a God which stood above the world, removed from ordinary life, divinity in the Wiccan tradition was understood to imbue both heaven and earth. This tradition also recalled a period when human society functioned without hierarchy- either matriarchal or patriarchal- and without gender, racial or strict class rankings. It was a tradition that affirmed the potential for humanity to live without domination and fear, something orthodox Christians maintain is impossible.
The early Church had tried to eradicate the vestiges of this older non-hierarchical tradition by denying the existence of witches or magic outside of the Church. The Canon Episcopi, a Church law which first appeared in 906, decreed that belief in witchcraft was heretical. After describing pagan rituals which involved women demonstrating extraordinary powers, it declared:
For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true and, so believing, wander from the right faith and are involved in the error of the pagans when they think that there is anything of divinity or power except the one God.
Nevertheless, the belief in magic was still so prevalent in the fourteenth century that the Council of Chartres ordered anathema to be pronounced against sorcerers each Sunday in every church.
It took the Church a long time to persuade society that women were inclined toward evil witchcraft and devil-worship. Reversing its policy of denying the existence of witches, in the thirteenth century the Church began depicting the witch as a slave of the devil. No longer was she or he to be associated with an older pagan tradition. No longer was the witch to be thought of as benevolent healer, teacher, wise woman, or one who accessed divine power. She was now to be an evil satanic agent. The Church began authorizing frightening portrayals of the devil in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Images of a witch riding a broom first appeared in 1280. Thirteenth century art also depicted the devil's pact in which demons would steal children and in which parents themselves would deliver their children to the devil. The Church now portrayed witches with the same images so frequently used to characterize heretics: "...a small clandestine society engaged in anti-human practices, including infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality and orgiastic sex..."
The Church developed the concept of devil-worship as an astoundingly simplistic reversal of Christian rites and practices. Whereas God imposed divine law, the devil demanded adherence to a pact. Where Christians showed reverence to God by kneeling, witches paid homage to the devil by standing on their heads. The sacraments in the Catholic Church became excrements in the devil's church. Communion was parodied by the Black Mass. Christian prayers could be used to work evil by being recited backwards. The eucharist bread or host was imitated in the devil's service by a turnip. The baptismal "character" or stigmata of the mysteries was parodied by the devil's mark impressed upon the witch's body by the claw of the devil's left hand. Whereas saints had the gift of tears, witches were said to be incapable of shedding tears. Devil worship was a simple parody of Christianity. Indeed, the very concept of the devil was exclusive to monotheism and had no importance within the pagan, Wiccan tradition.
The Church also projected its own hierarchical framework onto this new evil witchcraft. The devil's church was to be organized such that its dignitaries could climb the ranks to the position of bishop, just like in the Catholic Church. Julio Caro Baroja explains:
...the Devil causes churches and altars to appear with music... and devils decked out as saints. The dignitaries reach rank of bishop, and sub-deacons, deacons and priests serve Mass. Candles and incense are used for the service and water is sprinkled from a thurifer. There is an offertory, a sermon, a blessing over the equivalents of bread and wine... So that nothing should be missing there are even false martyrs in the organization.
Again, such hierarchy was entirely a projection of the Church that bore no resemblance to ancient paganism. By recognizing both masculine and feminine faces of God and by understanding God to be infused throughout the physical world, the Wiccan tradition had no need for strict hierarchical rankings.
Pope John XXII formalized the persecution of witchcraft in 1320 when he authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcery. ." Thereafter papal bulls and declarations grew increasingly vehement in their condemnation of witchcraft and of all those who "made a pact with hell." In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis desiderantes authorizing two inquisitors, Kramer and Sprenger, to systematize the persecution of witches. Two years later their manual, Malleus Maleficarum, was published with 14 editions following between 1487-1520 and at least 16 editions between 1574-1669. A papal bull in 1488 called upon the nations of Europe to rescue the Church of Christ which was "imperiled by the arts of Satan." The papacy and the Inquisition had successfully transformed the witch from a phenomenon whose existence the Church had previously rigorously denied into a phenomenon that was deemed very real, very frightening, the antithesis of Christianity, and absolutely deserving of persecution.
It was now heresy not to believe in the existence of witches. As the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum noted, "A belief that there are such things as witches is so essential a part of Catholic faith that obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion savors of heresy." Passages in the Bible such as "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" were cited to justify the persecution of witches. Both Calvin and Knox believed that to deny witchcraft was to deny the authority of the Bible. The eighteenth century founder of Methodism, John Wesley, declared to those skeptical of witchcraft, "The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible." And an eminent English lawyer wrote, "To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of Witchcraft and Sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testament."
The persecution of witchcraft enabled the Church to prolong the profitability of the Inquisition. The Inquisition had left regions so economically destitute that the inquisitor Eymeric complained, "In our days there are no more rich heretics... it is a pity that so salutary an institution as ours should be so uncertain of its future." By adding witchcraft to the crimes it persecuted, however, the Inquisition exposed a whole new group of people from whom to collect money. It took every advantage of this opportunity. The author Barbara Walker notes:
Victims were charged for the very ropes that bound them and the wood that burned them. Each procedure of torture carried its fee. After the execution of a wealthy witch, officials usually treated themselves to a banquet at the expense of the victim's estate.
In 1592 Father Cornelius Loos wrote:
Wretched creatures are compelled by the severity of the torture to confess things they have never done... and so by the cruel butchery innocent lives are taken; and, by a new alchemy, gold and silver are coined from human blood.
In many parts of Europe trials for witchcraft began exactly as the trials for other types of heresy stopped.
The process of formally persecuting witches followed the harshest inquisitional procedure. Once accused of witchcraft, it was virtually impossible to escape conviction. After cross- examination, the victim's body was examined for the witch's mark. The historian Walter Nigg described the process:
...she was stripped naked and the executioner shaved off all her body hair in order to seek in the hidden places of the body the sign which the devil imprinted on his cohorts. Warts, freckles, and birthmarks were considered certain tokens of amorous relations with Satan.
Should a woman show no sign of a witch's mark, guilt could still be established by methods such as sticking needles in the accused's eyes. In such a case, guilt was confirmed if the inquisitor could find an insensitive spot during the process.
Confession was then extracted by the hideous methods of torture already developed during earlier phases of the Inquisition. "Loathe they are to confess without torture," wrote King James I in his Daemonologie. A physician serving in witch prisons spoke of women driven half mad:
...by frequent torture... kept in prolonged squalor and darkness of their dungeons... and constantly dragged out to undergo atrocious torment until they would gladly exchange at any moment this most bitter existence for death, are willing to confess whatever crimes are suggested to them rather than to be thrust back into their hideous dungeon amid ever recurring torture.
Unless the witch died during torture, she was taken to the stake. Since many of the burnings took place in public squares, inquisitors prevented the victims from talking to the crowds by using wooden gags or cutting their tongue out. Unlike a heretic or a Jew who would usually be burnt alive only after they had relapsed into their heresy or Judaism, a witch would be burnt upon the first conviction.
Sexual mutilation of accused witches was not uncommon. With the orthodox understanding that divinity had little or nothing to do with the physical world, sexual desire was perceived to be ungodly. When the men persecuting the accused witches found themselves sexually aroused, they assumed that such desire emanated, not from themselves, but from the woman. They attacked breasts and genitals with pincers, pliers and red-hot irons. Some rules condoned sexual abuse by allowing men deemed "zealous Catholics" to visit female prisoners in solitary confinement while never allowing female visitors. The people of Toulouse were so convinced that the inquisitor Foulques de Saint-George arraigned women for no other reason than to sexually abuse them that they took the dangerous and unusual step of gathering evidence against him.
The horror of the witch hunts knew no bounds. The Church had never treated the children of persecuted parents with compassion, but its treatment of witches' children was particularly brutal. Children were liable to be prosecuted and tortured for witchcraft: girls, once they were nine and a half, and boys, once they were ten and a half. Younger children were tortured in order to elicit testimony that could be used against their parents. Even the testimony of two-year-old children was considered valid in cases of witchcraft though such testimony was never admissible in other types of trials. A famous French magistrate was known to have regretted his leniency when, instead of having young children accused of witchcraft burned, he had only sentenced them to be flogged while they watched their parents burn.
Witches were held accountable for nearly every problem. Any threat to social uniformity, any questioning of authority, and any act of rebellion could now be attributed to and prosecuted as witchcraft. Not surprisingly, areas of political turmoil and religious strife experienced the most intense witch hunts. Witch-hunting tended to be much more severe in Germany, Switzerland, France, Poland and Scotland than in more homogeneously Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain. Witch-hunters declared that "Rebellion is as the sin of Witchcraft." In 1661 Scottish royalists proclaimed that "Rebellion is the mother of witchcraft." And in England the Puritan William Perkins called the witch "The most notorious traytor and rebell that can be..."
The Reformation played a critical role in convincing people to blame witches for their problems. Protestants and reformed Catholics taught that any magic was sinful since it indicated a belief in divine assistance in the physical world. The only supernatural energy in the physical world was to be of the devil. Without magic to counter evil or misfortune, people were left with no form of protection other than to kill the devil's agent, the witch. Particularly in Protestant countries, where protective rituals such as crossing oneself, sprinkling holy water or calling on saints or guardian angels were no longer allowed, people felt defenseless. As Shakespeare's character, Prospero, says in The Tempest:
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
which is most faint...
It was most often the sermons of both Catholic and Protestant preachers that would instigate a witch hunt. The terrible Basque witch hunt of 1610 began after Fray Domingo de Sardo came to preach about witchcraft. "[T]here were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about," remarked a contemporary named Salazar. The witch hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, were similarly preceded by the fearful sermons and preaching of Samuel Parris in 1692." cont'd in the thread linked at the beginning here.
Have you heard about saving people? Yep. You too can be 'saved' and live in Heaven. There are many ways to get rid of your demons. You sometimes can choose or buy your way into a different category of being saved. I have no evidence of a price list and I suspect it has a lot to do with the marketing axiom "Whatever the market will bear." I know the Catholics still get loads of "special dispensatory" income and "confessional" revenue for services rendered. That includes estates and wills that are sometimes written by the godly priest for the illiterate Alzheimer's patient. They are after all the only professional exorcists - they claim.
All disease was said to be a result of sins and demons at one point in time (before Paracelsus and even after he revived medical science) and the official church position is still somewhat unclear. It is not enough to have the Catholic Encyclopedia as your source even though it is Nihil Obstat and other high-falutin verbiage (or is that garbiage). The local bishop was heard to say the Pope was losing his mind in 1999 when the Pope said there was no Heaven or Hell. This site says exorcisms are similarly in limbo (get it?).
The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel A.K.A Emily Rose - Catholic ...
forums.catholic.com › Forums › Catholic Living › Spirituality
Aug 28, 2008 - 15 posts - 8 authors
The Church does not grant exorcisms without being 100% sure of the facts. .... It seems difficult to find an official "Church position" on whether or ..."
But let us examine the period before concubinage was outlawed and even before the Church declared all priests were celibate in order to make it impossible for any of their administration to will an estate to a child of their blood. BTW which do you think was first? Did they outlaw sex with concubines after they outlawed sex? Let us go back to the outlawed Malleus Maleficarum and other burning of books (Hitler had learned this lesson as a good Catholic should when they celebrated the burning of books - and his minions saw another use of incinerators later on.). But before I start putting history into the thread let me add a little levity.
It is not true that those days were much different than today. Yes, during the dark ages the church was a factor but the practice of keeping power and knowledge to oneself or their group has good reason; and existed long before there even were churches. The first law of the Magi is Know, Will, Dare, Keep Silent or Scrire, Potere, Audere and I leave out the Keep Silent since the opening of the atomic gates. Pythagoras and Socrates wrote nothing - not because they had nothing to say.
So why not share power and knowledge? I give you one thing or time to consider. The Cathars freed women to be the equal of men, they had free education and free medicine. Their source of great wealth includes secret trade to the Americas but if one reads my work on Berenguer Sauniere they will find another possibility. So with all this going on you might expect a little turmoil from the average personages who enjoyed status quo. But even with the backing of the Alumbrados (Illuminati and De Medici or Benjaminites as well as Templars) they were burned at the stake and had to flee their land to go to the Balkans as the Bogomils or America later as the Huguenots under the auspices of the Merovingian John Jacob Astor.
When 250,000 men, women and children singing songs to the living love of Jesus (which means The Brotherhood of Man and is a title) were burned by Simon de Montfort and the Hounds of Hell a large number of knowledgeable people got first hand initiation to the second law of the Magi - As Above, So Below. I jest truly.
It also isn't just secrets that need to be considered. Throughout time there have been access to information issues such as do people actually read or care to learn after having the joy of learning drummed out of them by churches or parents who know so little about things themselves. Here is Bertrand Russell talking about Mass Psychology which includes religious seers pontificating and being listened to by the great unwashed. “I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.”
Today the same stuff happens in other ways. Malcolm Muggeridge observed that if Jesus were alive today he would be institutionalized or kept in a drugged state. Yes, people are threatened by knowledge because true knowledge carries great responsibility. Most people prefer ignorance even though it is not blissful there is peace of mind when one does not feel the pain of having enough knowledge to know things are not right. That leads to the third law of the Magi and my favorite. RIGHT THOUGHT = RIGHT ACTION.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. - H.L. Mencken
"The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.” – Thomas Jefferson
As this author says (somewhat tongue in cheek) all books of the Bible and this cult are corrupt. Savior = save your ($$)
The Truth Contest | What is the Ultimate Truth?
From: The Dark Side of Christian History
by Helen Ellerbe
The Reformation did not convert the people of Europe to orthodox Christianity through preaching and catechisms alone. It was the 300 year period of witch-hunting from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, what R.H. Robbins called "the shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of western civilization." The Church created the elaborate concept of devil worship and then, used the persecution of it to wipe out dissent, subordinate the individual to authoritarian control, and openly denigrate women.
The witch hunts were an eruption of orthodox Christianity's vilification of women, "the weaker vessel," in St. Peter's words. The second century St. Clement of Alexandria wrote: "Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman." The Church father Tertullian explained why women deserve their status as despised and inferior human beings:
"And do you not know that you are an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert that is, death even the Son of God had to die."
Others expressed the view more bluntly. The sixth century Christian philosopher, Boethius, wrote in The Consolation of Philosophy, "Woman is a temple built upon a sewer." Bishops at the sixth century Council of Macon voted as to whether or not women had souls. In the tenth century Odo of Cluny declared, "To embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure..." The thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas suggested that God had made a mistake in creating woman: "nothing [deficient] or defective should have been produced in the first establishment of things; so woman ought not to have been produced then." And Lutherans at Wittenberg debated whether women were really human beings at all. Orthodox Christians held women responsible for all sin. As the Bible's Apocrypha states, "Of woman came the beginning of sin And thanks to her, we all must die."
Women are often understood to be impediments to spirituality in a context where God reigns strictly from heaven and demands a renunciation of physical pleasure. As I Corinthians 7:1 states, "It is a good thing for a man to have nothing to do with a woman." The Inquisitors who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, "The Hammer of the Witches," explained that women are more likely to become witches:
'Because the female sex is more concerned with things of the flesh than men;' because being formed from a man's rib, they are only 'imperfect animals' and 'crooked' whereas man belongs to a privileged sex from whose midst Christ emerged.
Christians found fault with women on all sorts of counts. An historian notes that thirteenth century preachers
...denounced women on the one hand for... the lascivious and carnal provocation of their garments, and on the other hand for being over- industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give due thought to divine things.
As reformational fervor spread, the feminine aspect of Christianity in the worship of Mary became suspect. Throughout the Middle Ages, Mary's powers were believed to effectively curtail those of the devil. But Protestants entirely dismissed reverence for Mary while reformed Catholics diminished her importance. Devotion to Mary often became indicative of evil. In the Canary islands, Aldonca de Vargas was reported to the Inquisition after she smiled at hearing mention of the Virgin Mary. Inquisitors distorted an image of the Virgin Mary into a device of torture, covering the front side of a statue of Mary with sharp knives and nails. Levers would move the arms of the statue crushing the victim against the knives and nails.
The witch hunts also demonstrated great fear of female sexuality. The book that served as the manual for understanding and persecuting witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, describes how witches were known to "collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest..." The manual recounts a story of a man who, having lost his penis, went to a witch to have it restored:
She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to a parish priest.
A man in 1621 lamented, "of women's unnatural, unsatiable lust... what country, what village doth not complain."
While most of what became known as witchcraft was invented by Christians, certain elements of witchcraft did represent an older pagan tradition. Witchcraft was linked and even considered to be synonymous with "divination," which means not only the art of foretelling the future, but also the discovery of knowledge by the aid of supernatural power. It suggests that there is such power available- something orthodox Christians insisted could only be the power of the devil, for God was no longer to be involved with the physical world.
The word "witch" comes from the old English wicce and wicca, meaning the male and female participants in the ancient pagan tradition which holds masculine, feminine and earthly aspects of God in great reverence. Rather than a God which stood above the world, removed from ordinary life, divinity in the Wiccan tradition was understood to imbue both heaven and earth. This tradition also recalled a period when human society functioned without hierarchy- either matriarchal or patriarchal- and without gender, racial or strict class rankings. It was a tradition that affirmed the potential for humanity to live without domination and fear, something orthodox Christians maintain is impossible.
The early Church had tried to eradicate the vestiges of this older non-hierarchical tradition by denying the existence of witches or magic outside of the Church. The Canon Episcopi, a Church law which first appeared in 906, decreed that belief in witchcraft was heretical. After describing pagan rituals which involved women demonstrating extraordinary powers, it declared:
For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true and, so believing, wander from the right faith and are involved in the error of the pagans when they think that there is anything of divinity or power except the one God.
Nevertheless, the belief in magic was still so prevalent in the fourteenth century that the Council of Chartres ordered anathema to be pronounced against sorcerers each Sunday in every church.
It took the Church a long time to persuade society that women were inclined toward evil witchcraft and devil-worship. Reversing its policy of denying the existence of witches, in the thirteenth century the Church began depicting the witch as a slave of the devil. No longer was she or he to be associated with an older pagan tradition. No longer was the witch to be thought of as benevolent healer, teacher, wise woman, or one who accessed divine power. She was now to be an evil satanic agent. The Church began authorizing frightening portrayals of the devil in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Images of a witch riding a broom first appeared in 1280. Thirteenth century art also depicted the devil's pact in which demons would steal children and in which parents themselves would deliver their children to the devil. The Church now portrayed witches with the same images so frequently used to characterize heretics: "...a small clandestine society engaged in anti-human practices, including infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality and orgiastic sex..."
The Church developed the concept of devil-worship as an astoundingly simplistic reversal of Christian rites and practices. Whereas God imposed divine law, the devil demanded adherence to a pact. Where Christians showed reverence to God by kneeling, witches paid homage to the devil by standing on their heads. The sacraments in the Catholic Church became excrements in the devil's church. Communion was parodied by the Black Mass. Christian prayers could be used to work evil by being recited backwards. The eucharist bread or host was imitated in the devil's service by a turnip. The baptismal "character" or stigmata of the mysteries was parodied by the devil's mark impressed upon the witch's body by the claw of the devil's left hand. Whereas saints had the gift of tears, witches were said to be incapable of shedding tears. Devil worship was a simple parody of Christianity. Indeed, the very concept of the devil was exclusive to monotheism and had no importance within the pagan, Wiccan tradition.
The Church also projected its own hierarchical framework onto this new evil witchcraft. The devil's church was to be organized such that its dignitaries could climb the ranks to the position of bishop, just like in the Catholic Church. Julio Caro Baroja explains:
...the Devil causes churches and altars to appear with music... and devils decked out as saints. The dignitaries reach rank of bishop, and sub-deacons, deacons and priests serve Mass. Candles and incense are used for the service and water is sprinkled from a thurifer. There is an offertory, a sermon, a blessing over the equivalents of bread and wine... So that nothing should be missing there are even false martyrs in the organization.
Again, such hierarchy was entirely a projection of the Church that bore no resemblance to ancient paganism. By recognizing both masculine and feminine faces of God and by understanding God to be infused throughout the physical world, the Wiccan tradition had no need for strict hierarchical rankings.
Pope John XXII formalized the persecution of witchcraft in 1320 when he authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcery. ." Thereafter papal bulls and declarations grew increasingly vehement in their condemnation of witchcraft and of all those who "made a pact with hell." In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis desiderantes authorizing two inquisitors, Kramer and Sprenger, to systematize the persecution of witches. Two years later their manual, Malleus Maleficarum, was published with 14 editions following between 1487-1520 and at least 16 editions between 1574-1669. A papal bull in 1488 called upon the nations of Europe to rescue the Church of Christ which was "imperiled by the arts of Satan." The papacy and the Inquisition had successfully transformed the witch from a phenomenon whose existence the Church had previously rigorously denied into a phenomenon that was deemed very real, very frightening, the antithesis of Christianity, and absolutely deserving of persecution.
It was now heresy not to believe in the existence of witches. As the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum noted, "A belief that there are such things as witches is so essential a part of Catholic faith that obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion savors of heresy." Passages in the Bible such as "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" were cited to justify the persecution of witches. Both Calvin and Knox believed that to deny witchcraft was to deny the authority of the Bible. The eighteenth century founder of Methodism, John Wesley, declared to those skeptical of witchcraft, "The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible." And an eminent English lawyer wrote, "To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of Witchcraft and Sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testament."
The persecution of witchcraft enabled the Church to prolong the profitability of the Inquisition. The Inquisition had left regions so economically destitute that the inquisitor Eymeric complained, "In our days there are no more rich heretics... it is a pity that so salutary an institution as ours should be so uncertain of its future." By adding witchcraft to the crimes it persecuted, however, the Inquisition exposed a whole new group of people from whom to collect money. It took every advantage of this opportunity. The author Barbara Walker notes:
Victims were charged for the very ropes that bound them and the wood that burned them. Each procedure of torture carried its fee. After the execution of a wealthy witch, officials usually treated themselves to a banquet at the expense of the victim's estate.
In 1592 Father Cornelius Loos wrote:
Wretched creatures are compelled by the severity of the torture to confess things they have never done... and so by the cruel butchery innocent lives are taken; and, by a new alchemy, gold and silver are coined from human blood.
In many parts of Europe trials for witchcraft began exactly as the trials for other types of heresy stopped.
The process of formally persecuting witches followed the harshest inquisitional procedure. Once accused of witchcraft, it was virtually impossible to escape conviction. After cross- examination, the victim's body was examined for the witch's mark. The historian Walter Nigg described the process:
...she was stripped naked and the executioner shaved off all her body hair in order to seek in the hidden places of the body the sign which the devil imprinted on his cohorts. Warts, freckles, and birthmarks were considered certain tokens of amorous relations with Satan.
Should a woman show no sign of a witch's mark, guilt could still be established by methods such as sticking needles in the accused's eyes. In such a case, guilt was confirmed if the inquisitor could find an insensitive spot during the process.
Confession was then extracted by the hideous methods of torture already developed during earlier phases of the Inquisition. "Loathe they are to confess without torture," wrote King James I in his Daemonologie. A physician serving in witch prisons spoke of women driven half mad:
...by frequent torture... kept in prolonged squalor and darkness of their dungeons... and constantly dragged out to undergo atrocious torment until they would gladly exchange at any moment this most bitter existence for death, are willing to confess whatever crimes are suggested to them rather than to be thrust back into their hideous dungeon amid ever recurring torture.
Unless the witch died during torture, she was taken to the stake. Since many of the burnings took place in public squares, inquisitors prevented the victims from talking to the crowds by using wooden gags or cutting their tongue out. Unlike a heretic or a Jew who would usually be burnt alive only after they had relapsed into their heresy or Judaism, a witch would be burnt upon the first conviction.
Sexual mutilation of accused witches was not uncommon. With the orthodox understanding that divinity had little or nothing to do with the physical world, sexual desire was perceived to be ungodly. When the men persecuting the accused witches found themselves sexually aroused, they assumed that such desire emanated, not from themselves, but from the woman. They attacked breasts and genitals with pincers, pliers and red-hot irons. Some rules condoned sexual abuse by allowing men deemed "zealous Catholics" to visit female prisoners in solitary confinement while never allowing female visitors. The people of Toulouse were so convinced that the inquisitor Foulques de Saint-George arraigned women for no other reason than to sexually abuse them that they took the dangerous and unusual step of gathering evidence against him.
The horror of the witch hunts knew no bounds. The Church had never treated the children of persecuted parents with compassion, but its treatment of witches' children was particularly brutal. Children were liable to be prosecuted and tortured for witchcraft: girls, once they were nine and a half, and boys, once they were ten and a half. Younger children were tortured in order to elicit testimony that could be used against their parents. Even the testimony of two-year-old children was considered valid in cases of witchcraft though such testimony was never admissible in other types of trials. A famous French magistrate was known to have regretted his leniency when, instead of having young children accused of witchcraft burned, he had only sentenced them to be flogged while they watched their parents burn.
Witches were held accountable for nearly every problem. Any threat to social uniformity, any questioning of authority, and any act of rebellion could now be attributed to and prosecuted as witchcraft. Not surprisingly, areas of political turmoil and religious strife experienced the most intense witch hunts. Witch-hunting tended to be much more severe in Germany, Switzerland, France, Poland and Scotland than in more homogeneously Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain. Witch-hunters declared that "Rebellion is as the sin of Witchcraft." In 1661 Scottish royalists proclaimed that "Rebellion is the mother of witchcraft." And in England the Puritan William Perkins called the witch "The most notorious traytor and rebell that can be..."
The Reformation played a critical role in convincing people to blame witches for their problems. Protestants and reformed Catholics taught that any magic was sinful since it indicated a belief in divine assistance in the physical world. The only supernatural energy in the physical world was to be of the devil. Without magic to counter evil or misfortune, people were left with no form of protection other than to kill the devil's agent, the witch. Particularly in Protestant countries, where protective rituals such as crossing oneself, sprinkling holy water or calling on saints or guardian angels were no longer allowed, people felt defenseless. As Shakespeare's character, Prospero, says in The Tempest:
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
which is most faint...
It was most often the sermons of both Catholic and Protestant preachers that would instigate a witch hunt. The terrible Basque witch hunt of 1610 began after Fray Domingo de Sardo came to preach about witchcraft. "[T]here were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about," remarked a contemporary named Salazar. The witch hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, were similarly preceded by the fearful sermons and preaching of Samuel Parris in 1692." cont'd in the thread linked at the beginning here.
