Hammer of the Witches

Witchcraft trials are a part of our history, but what truly went on during the 1400s? Join Robert and Julie as they explore compelling theories about the nature of superstitious religious persecution. What went wrong? Is it still going wrong today?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas.
We are recording this episode on Halloween on the thirty
one of October, which is kind of fitting because we
are talking about witches, uh, and we're talking about the

(00:26):
persecution of which is and the hammer of which is
the malius mellificarum. We'll get into all that in a minute,
but really the starting point here is, of course, the
idea of the which the modern idea of the witch
that emerges from past lies, truths, atrocities, all of which
we're going to discuss in this episode. For your part, Julie,

(00:50):
what what do you think of when you hear the
word which, Well, I always think about the archetype, right,
I think about a witch on a broom. I think
about all the children's stories which are rife with witches,
from Snow White to the Wizard of Oz, right, which
is are so ingrained in our culture, and so on
a personal level, I think as a female, it's always

(01:12):
been of interest to me because I think it's some
sort of subconscious level when you are a female. You
know that this is an archetype and that you know,
society has been saying for a long time, you know,
women have the sort of evil side to them, and
that's really where the roots of this idea of which
is comes from. Which we'll discuss and will unpack this

(01:34):
idea a little bit more later, but backing up and
sort of looking at this topic, I think it's fascinating
in the context of the last four hundred, six hundred
years of history to try to get a bead on
psychologically where we're coming from. Um, no matter what topic
it is that we're covering, there's always going to be
a bit of flavoring from this idea, of of which

(01:57):
is whether or not we know it just sounds like
a ridiculous statements to say, but kind of looking you
to your own life and look at how stories or
even news stories or fiction is created, and then look
back to these tales of witches and you will see
some of some of the roots or the blueprint of

(02:19):
how we go about our lives. Like from a modern standpoint,
which the gender issues involved in the idea of the
witch are fascinating. Think of Hollywood, for instance, countless beautiful
younger actresses, they have all the starring female roles. Then
they get a little older, what do they inevitably play?
They end up playing witches. I mean, it's almost a
joke at this point. In fact, I've heard maybe it

(02:41):
was Glenn Close, I want to say, who was joking
about reaching the age where she suddenly was receiving a
lot of roles for witches. Yeah, you know which, Like,
what does that say about us? And certainly the witch
is an important character in fiction. I always think to
the witches in Macbeth is just one of the classic
examples of of eagle witchery in modern fiction and in

(03:02):
our modern understanding of what a witch is. That's obviously
that's a huge archetype to fall back on. But where
do these archetypes arise from? That's what we're gonna talk
about in this episode. And one thing we need to
get out and get clear right off the bat is
the difference between which and wiccan and uh. For me,
I mean I tend to I didn't think about this

(03:23):
all that much because I tend to think of them
in two distinct categories like wickens. To me, those are
people I know, I know wickens in real life I
see them, you know, these are people who have a
particular religious, um spiritual belief system and more power to them.
And then in the other category, I tend to lump
the witches from mcbethum historical witches and everything else. Well.

(03:47):
And it's so we have weakens in one pocket, and
we're talking more about in nature based system right um.
And then we have witchcraft, which is entirely different witchcraft
we're going to discuss um more in terms of religion
and how it was actually something that was created uh
and not something necessarily practiced by people throughout the ages.

(04:10):
That witchcraft is this largely um fictionalized account all boils
to the surface around fourteen hundred as well discussed now
before that. You obviously have stories of monsters, hags in
female female monsters that prey upon on children and cause mayhem.
Those are as old as his human history, and they

(04:33):
exist in every society on Earth. Every culture has a
sort of which and in likewise cultures around the world
have There are always there's always gonna be a history
of females who are in important roles that may or
may not have some sort of attributed uh, spiritual or
or healing powers about them. That's also as old as time.

(04:55):
But fourteen hundred that's when we see the emergence, the
real emergen gents of the idea of the evil witch,
the demonic witch. And out of that time bubbles all
of this horrible witchcraft persecution, right because at that point
we are people went from looking at which is as
a psychological embodiment of evil and wrongdoing and try to

(05:20):
then say that humans could actually physically embody this idea
of evil. Okay, so that gives license to do a
lot of horrible things. And when we talk about horrible things,
what we are talking about are people who were killed
and tortured. And from the fourteen hundreds to the seventeen
hundreds and estimated half million people were executed for witchcraft,

(05:43):
were accused and executed, mostly women. Them are women, some
men and then also children as youngest like seven or
eight were tried and executed on crimes as hard and
unbelievable as the sexual relations with a demon. So we're
going to go and try to do is get to
the bottom of the reason why this happened. Um, try

(06:04):
to take this long view and look back in history
and figure out all the different elements that led up
to this. But I did want to mention that it's
not just in past history. We'll talk a little bit
more about that later on. Exorcism still take place around
the world, and the magical thinking involved in all of this.
We're gonna look at a lot of the different sources
of this witchcraft persecution, and so many of those sources,

(06:27):
be they cultural or economic, they're still around today. To
think about that as we move forward. It is absolutely
relevant to today. And I just wanted to read a
quick quote from Erica Johng in her book, which is
she says, clearly, there are pagan beliefs still present in
our modern world, and none of them inspires in us
a lust for torturing and incinerating our neighbors here in

(06:47):
the West. That's what she's talking about. But lest we
make the mistake of assuming that our ancestors were less
intelligent than we, a concept known as doom height or
primeval stupidity, let us think of all the things we
would kill our neighbors for. That which is not dead,
she is merely hibernating, and which hunting itself, is hardly dead.
It is merely waiting to be born again under a

(07:07):
different name exactly. So let's go back to fourteen hundred again.
This is a key point in history where suddenly we
see this idea of the witch rising to the surface
of thought in Western Europe. It's interesting if you look
back before Dred you had plenty of stories of individuals
seeking advice from the devil or his demons, engaging in

(07:30):
various magical spells and and and seeking demonic aid. But
they were called necromancers. They were They were men. They
were generally learned men, members of the clergy, or for
all intents and purposes, scientists or wizards if you will.
They were. They were the kind of people who owned
a library, had access to quote unquote secret knowledge, and

(07:52):
could could really dive into the sort of occultist nonsense,
hardcore and it was it was generally considered that this
was not something that women were up for. This was again,
this was something that learned, powerful men did, not some
crazy woman down the street with too many cats. Okay,
it was. It was a very sexist idea because you know,

(08:14):
every all things equal, why shouldn't women be able to
reach out to the devil for aid? Right prior to
fourteen hundred when it came to seeking the advice of
demons and entering packs. It was a man's world for sure. Yeah.
And and necromancer would have been one of a triumvirant
of dark arts here. So you'd have white magic, dark magic,
and then you would have necromancy. Yeah. White magic would

(08:36):
be a stuff like you go to your local healer
and and he or she would have some sort of
shamanist expels. So it would be a mixture of things
that were you know, some of it were probably actual
folk remedies that worked, and some things that were purely
superstitious and magical thinking. Likewise, the dark magic would be
your area of putting hexes on things or curses. Um. Again,

(08:59):
magical thinking uh and too, maybe into a limited extent,
maybe actual folk uh, anti remedies if you will, um.
But but for the most part, magical thinking in that
department as well, aimed at harming people. And then you
had necromancy, which was reaching out into the void, trying
to contact the realms beyond death, trying to contact spirits

(09:21):
and demons and uh and and really it brings my
mind back to our previous episode on Luigi Boards and
Bloody Mary in these various semi occult parlor tricks that
we played at our various sweepovers when we were kids,
Like those were all things that you would do with
this kind of butterfly in your stomach nervousness, because we
were reaching out to see if there was something out there,

(09:43):
to see if you could touch this supernatural idea that
we create in the world. And uh and necromancy was
was basically that, and on some levels a very learned
example of that, where you would have books and books
about how to reach out and touch something that exists
only in your mind. So to your point, this was
male territory. And so you would have scholars, you would

(10:05):
have clergy who would look to this and say, there's
no way that a woman could be a witch as
we know, as we have come to term a witch.
There's no way that she could be or have this
sort of relationship with the devil and and um, you know,
fly on broomsticks during the night. It's impossible. So they
were actually that that was really sort of their position
on women couldn't assume this this type of power. And

(10:28):
in the churches, um and certainly you would have stories
of people doing magical things and because because again magical
thinking is as oldest human history. Likewise, paranormal experience is
a biological reality. As we've discussed when we've talked about
UFO abductions and whatnot in the past, those experiences, no
matter how we color them with with our cultural pigments,

(10:51):
um things such as sleep paralysis are real and occur,
and then our interpretation of them that may involve anything
from uh an extraterrestrial to a wood nomp. Likewise, individuals
of varying degrees of psychosis are going to have experiences
that do not match up with everyone else's real world experiences.
I mean, the list goes on and on. But if

(11:12):
you came to the clergy prior to fourteen hundred and
you said, hey, lady down the road, she's flying around
at night and summon in goblins, they the official church
stance was that is nonsense, that does not fly with
church doctrine. Cut that stuff out. Yeah, And actually there
were some laws that were saying, hey, there are no
witches first of all, the second of all, do not
persecute or kill witches. Okay, so this was generally the

(11:35):
accepted idea. Yeah, but then that begins to change and
That's what's so fascinating about this because around fourteen hundred,
not only does the idea of the witch the demon
summoning which arise in Europe, but it is pushed for,
it is campaigned for, it is the literature is published
and distributed into the world. Making the case and having

(11:56):
that the point is having to make the strong case
because prior to four hundred, it was not a generally
accepted idea that women could women could do this, We're
doing this. It was a reality that had to be
created by men. Well. Also, you have different religious I
guess you could say sex of um of Christianity who

(12:17):
are really trying to be the completely religious monopoly out there.
And so we have talked I actually talked about this before,
but I think it's pretty well known that a lot
of pagan sites where their rituals occurred, you know, churches
were built there. Um, there's a lot of appropriation of Pagans.

(12:37):
You'll see that in saints and in Catholicism. Yeah, you
see if saints, old heroes become saints, old gods are
wrapped up in demonology and become demons. Uh, the opposite
been of the various angels before four. This was for
a few hundred years as a craze of angelology and demonology,
where you were just sort of populating the ranks of

(12:58):
imagined havens and hells with different demons and angels. So,
I mean the problem here is that, um, not only
are you trying to have a monopoly on religion here
through Christianity, but um, you have you have this imaginary,
wicked religion that is basically created by some people in

(13:19):
Christianity to try to further define this this evil and
work against it, um, and and feel as though these
persecutions are justified by lines like an exodus, this is
thou shalt not permit sorceress to live. So there seems
to be these justifications coming online. And in addition to that,

(13:40):
if you look at previous to the fifteenth century, you
have a lot of grappling with what is Christianity. And
we'll talk more about that later about trying to define
it and order it and take all the different interpretations
and all of the different writings and come up with
some sort of cohesive like let's all fall in line
behind this idea. Yeah, and let's not add to it

(14:02):
too much with a bunch of angels and demons, because
that's that's an example there where the Church had to
finally say, whoa guys, let's stop making up angels and demons.
We have enough, We probably have too many. And certainly
you also see the history of heresy in the adxistence
of the Spanish Inquisition, um in in the Catholic Church
that was there too sort of edit the text to

(14:24):
keep people from adding too much to it, from deviating
what was perceived to be the core message of Christianity.
So so if you were off message, then you were
committing heresy right that you were ringed in For instance,
the Dalcinians, they were a heresy that believed not only
the poverty of Christ, but that everyone should be poor,
that the Church should be poor, and that the rich

(14:45):
should be violently opposed, sort of a much bloodier version,
say of occupy Wall Street. I guess you could say,
with a certain harsh medieval flare, but that is an
idea that sprang up and it had to be, in
the Church's eyes, squelched. But the heresies are all things
where for the most part the heresies were real. It
was somebody with an opinion or a view of Christianity

(15:07):
that that deviated from what was seen as the core path.
You might add some lies on top of that to
press the case to actually eliminate them, but for the
most part, they were going after actual beliefs, right, So
I mean this is I mean, if you look at
the Inquisition and different aspects of the campaign you're talking
about from eleven to sixteen hundred, and because of religious

(15:28):
or political beliefs, people are are being questioned and they're
off message, right, they're trying to rein them in. But
but where we really differentiate with witchcraft is again that
this is stuff that was almost entirely made up. There
were no actual witches, not like the ones that that
the charges and the trials claimed existed. Okay, So so

(15:49):
in order to try to get a bead on how
this sort of get this idea of which is sorted
to get into the fabric of religion and also education,
you have to understand that colleges and universities were largely
under the thumb of religion until you know fairly recently. Um,
if you are a degree candidate in theology at the
University of Paris in the fourteen hundreds, you would be

(16:10):
expected to demonstrate your knowledge of demonology and angelology by
commenting publicly on the Four Books of Sentences. Now, this
was a standard university textbook used throughout the Middle Ages
and into the early Modern period. So already you would
have been steeped in this mythology of demons and angels. Now,

(16:33):
not only that you are now training, essentially um an
army of clergyman to then go out into villages, into
society's all over Western Europe and to spread this word
about demons and angels. So you know, some people say, well,
how could you know between the years of four and
fourteen eighty there have been such a seed change in

(16:54):
this idea of which is and there was h there
was something that I read and I can't remember. I apologize,
I can't remember who it was who made this point.
But he said, well, if you look at the nineteen sixties,
and you look at the civil rights movement, and you
look at the sea change between nineteen sixties in present day,
and you consider all the modes of communication we have

(17:16):
that affected this change, Um, it's it's not inconceivable to say, like,
look back at fourteen hundred and realized that this was
all bubbling up, all of this sort of doctrine about
which is and evil and demons and angels um. So
that when something like this publication of Malius Maleficarium get

(17:40):
arrives on the scene in fourteen eighties six, that it's
really running with the idea of demons and which is
in creating a blueprint really for um, particularly Catholicism, to
follow through on what they think is essential to man's nature,
in particular when them, Yeah, Mallius malificarum is is a

(18:02):
key text when you when you look at the history
of witchcraft, persecution and just the idea of the witchcraft.
This was published again the work of Heinrich Kramer, Hammer
of the Witches, and it is a guide book to
identifying which is, knowing what they're up to and then
persecuting them or well, I guess prosecuting them and executing

(18:24):
them if you want to use the of the book,
because the book is making the the argument that all
of this is real and pressing it really hard. Is
a book that we used in part on this episode
called Demon Lovers by Walter Stevens, and he's primarily concerned
with the accusation that existed in all of these trials
that witches were engaged in physical sexual activity with demons.

(18:45):
That's his his The whole book is an exploration of that.
But he also does a great job of just really
diving into two witchcraft in general. But there's a whole
section where he just takes apart Malius malificarum and and
analyzes what Heinrich Kramer is doing in each part, Like
what is he thinking is he's writing this and he's
having to make really strong cases to again press the

(19:06):
idea that there are female which is out there, that
there are women out there in the world that are
actively engaging not only impacts and spell work with the
devil and his demons, but in actual physical sexual contact
with demons. Right and knowing that that they can shape

(19:27):
shift into animals, they can ride the brooms through the air,
the broomsticks, um, they can cause um spontaneous abortions, um,
just by that the exterior touch that they affect the weather,
they can create hill storms. Yeah, I mean he's not
he's not preaching to the converted here. This is not
a book where it came out and was like, oh yeah,

(19:48):
I picked up him on Hendrick's book because this is
everything I believe in already they would already have bought
into some of it, certainly, But again the demonology and
anginal angeology craze and post fourteen D the witchcraft thing
was already gaining steam. But this comes, and this just
pushes it even even further. It was the authoritative text Um.

(20:08):
Let me read a bit from it, Um, And of
course it came out in Latin, by the way, and
within thirty five years there were twenty different editions, so
it was a very popular book among the learned. This
is a bit from it. It says, which is offered
to devils or otherwise kill the children that they do
not otherwise devour, They cause abortion, kill infants in the
mother's womb by a mere exterior touch. Um also said

(20:31):
that midwives offered newborns to the devil at birth, and
that a woman knows no moderation and goodness or advice.
Devils do these things through the medium of women. So
again a lot of effort is being made by men
like Heinrich Kramer into making this argument, this very strong argument,
that women are engaging in witchcraft and engaging in physical

(20:53):
contact with demons. Why that's the that's the big question,
right as we look back through the ages, why does
this suddenly be I'm such a pressing issue. Why are
men wasting their lives and committing and when ultimately either
committing or inspiring a horrible atrocities in the name of
this ridiculous idea. And this is an important thing to mention. Two,

(21:14):
When we look back on witchcraft persecution, we have a
habit to think, oh, that was the Middle Ages. People
were stupid, people were crazy religious, and it was just
a violent or horrible time. So yeah, of course, horrible,
violent stuff like this is gonna happen. But the more
you look at when you look at what people were
writing in in these days and before and after, and
when when you start really analyzing the culture, you see

(21:36):
this wasn't really the case. I mean, it was a
different world, uh for sure, but it was it was
still an age in which you had reasoned men and women.
When you when you had educated men who were not
only exposed to a bunch of theological garbage about angels
and demons, they were also engaging in older philosophical text

(21:58):
They were familiar with the works of Aristotle. They were
in touch with individuals who were trying to understand how
the observable world works, and not only what was happening
happening in some unobservable spirit world. So bear that in
mind as we move forward. So, why was this happening?
It wasn't. It's not. So it's not just a case
of men deciding, Hey, I bet which is exists. Let's

(22:20):
make a case for it. What other energy is involved
in this pursuit? Well, again, I think part of it
is Christianity trying to assert itself in fallen line under
one doctrine. And so throughout history you had different um
takes on women and their their part in society. But
here is the dark view of women. Here's this idea

(22:42):
that women are weak and therefore they are subject to
being vessels of of demons. Um. You also have this
idea of women during this time coming into play, this
idea that women aren't necessarily companions to say, like their
their husbands, their counterparts. Um, there are more just you know,

(23:02):
part of what your wealth is, your accumulation of wealth.
And so if you if you begin to objectify this
person and and sort of say, okay, there's some distance
between me and this other person and not look at
them just as another human, then if you can see
how the Church sort of runs with this idea of well,
let's have the female as this embodiment of evil and

(23:23):
not just like you know this, hey, let's this is
our game plan for this century. But um, but you
know you have clergy clergyman who have been steeped again
in this sort of mythology, this mysticism, because think about
this is particularly in Catholicism. This is a religion that
that really relies on mysticism. Okay, this idea, um, that

(23:44):
there's all these unseen forces. Um. And if a woman
can embody that she can be the lightning rod, then
not only can she be sort of the scapegoat for
for everything, um, she can really play to this idea
of magical thinking which is already going on. Um if
you look at, say, for lack of a better word,

(24:06):
during this time, the lower classes merchants, peasants who are
really attached to magical thinking and panganism. So if the
Church can take this and run with it, then they
can exercise some sort of control over society. And then
there's also the idea that so the Christian world, the
medieval world, and to a lart extent, the modern world,
is highly matriarchal, but especially in this stage, you have

(24:28):
men at the top of it. You have a religion
and governments that are filled with men, and you have
a religion that has a male god. So the idea
is that if you go back far enough in history,
in fact, if you if you actually transition out of
recorded history, you find that the old religions are not
strictly male religions. They're not completely occupied by masculine gods

(24:54):
that are that are occupied with with with ideas of violence. Right,
And I know I want to go deeply into this,
but when you say the old religion, there are some
accounts of actually Jesus having um. I guess you could
say very different things to say than what is documented,
and that his relationship with Mary Magdalen was very different,

(25:15):
and that there was more of a sort of equals
um in play there in terms of their their relationship.
Oh yeah. And then you also have traditions, especially in
medieval art, where you see increasingly feminine portrayals of Jesus Christ.
The idea and the idea of being there that people
were connecting more with a feminine godhead than they were

(25:36):
with this uh, this Old Testament bearded man who liked
to destroy cities, and that was something that again when
the Church was rooting out heresy and trying to to
edit down what they actually were, this is one of
the things that they went after and said, guys, let's
let's chill with the female Jesus Is because you're you're
bordering on heresy here. The basic idea here is that

(26:00):
in our past we had more of a matriarchal view
of the universe and of nature and of the gods
that ruled over nature, and then over time that is
replaced with the patriarchal Godhead, and throughout history then the
patriarchal side has to continually reinforce the wall, to reinforce

(26:22):
the barriers and keep the matriarchal view from from working
its way back into into our thinking. And who is
the one human in Catholicism, uh, who would be closest
to God? Well, that would be the Son of God
right well? Or living Oh, that would be the Pope
right So in four four you have a papal proclamation

(26:45):
by Pope Innocent the eight who essentially says, all right,
let's let's go after which is and then this results
in this continent wide genocide of people. Yeah, so misogyny
is a is a definite theory and and certainly there's
no denying misogyny plays a role in witchcraft persecution because

(27:06):
it's mostly men convicting mostly women on entirely trumped up
charges of supernatural activity. Uh and uh. And people like
Heinrich Kramer again are making a case in their books
for the inherent evil of women. So I mean, it's
it's a no brainer, and it's it's horrible, but but
it's it's undeniable that misogyny plays a huge role in

(27:28):
all of this. So again, that's sort of where you
see the sea change coming into play, where between fourteen
hundred and fourteen eight four six and Mallius Mala Krum
comes on the scene, you see in Earnest Christianity sort
of going after this idea of witchcraft and really developing
the idea of witchcraft and adding to the mythology of it.
So yeah, learned men are developing it, they're publishing it,

(27:50):
books like like the Malleus mall of Acram are making
its way out there spreading the idea, and it's it's
trickling down then to the lay people. The normal people
out there in their villages and uh, and this is
important to note too, because it's not misogyny is one
of the the the powers in play here. But then
also on a local level, you're gonna have people engaging

(28:11):
in the same old craft that people always engage in,
petty disputes, spite, mistrust of outsiders, mistrust of the crazy
lady with all the cats, that kind of thing. So
when the the environment for witchcraft persecution takes hold, um,
you're gonna see some petty disputes that are going to
be taken care of on a local level via the

(28:32):
witchcraft trial system. You're gonna see you can see people
on the local level by into it, by into the
paranoia that the church and learned the members of society
are passing down. So it begins to distill through society.
So rather than looking at say some livestock that I
lost in you know, say four um as a product

(28:54):
of let's say a parasite, I might look to my
neighbor and say, ah, they put a spell on me. Yeah, accursed.
We love to blame somebody for for something that happens,
you know, be it if something bad happens to our animal,
better that we can point a finger at somebody or
something and if that somebody and something happens to be
that strange guy who lives on the edge of town
or that weird looking woman and the devil, so be

(29:16):
it right. And likewise, children are dying. All sorts of
horrible things are happening because there's death and childbirth. It's
the Middle Ages. Life is tough, just as life is
tough today, and people are gonna seek excuses, they're gonna
see answers, and if they can find somebody to blame
for something like this, all the better, right, Yeah, absolutely,

(29:36):
And so what you're starting to see is is a
bit of a flavor of the social contract. At that time.
We've talked about the social contract and various podcasts about
how we all have signed onto it, whether or not
we know it. So what we're seeing here is this
script really for what's happening in life, and the script
is being provided, uh, usually by the local clergy m.

(29:59):
So we're gonna take a quick break, but when we
get back, we're going to talk about the script and
how it is used in confessions in torture. All right,
we're back. So we've we've discussed what was happening post
fourteen hundred, Essentially this war on women begins. I mean

(30:20):
that term is thrown around today, and I'm not saying
it's completely pointless to throw that term around today, But
in the post four world this there's a lot of
truth to the idea. Well. And that's not to say
that this happening in the subteen hundreds doesn't somehow inform
our idea of what the war on women today is like.
It certainly does. But an important part of this, of course,

(30:42):
is that ultimately, if you're you can accuse people witchcraft
all day, but ultimately you're you're gonna need them to confess,
they have at least enough civility that they need them
to confess. You need And it comes down to, if
you're gonna make this horrible case and you're ultimately going
to do something horrible, you need need the victim of
this to buy in, or at least seem to buy

(31:06):
into the idea. You need some sort of acknowledgement that
what you're doing is real. Yeah, there are no Miranda
rights here and now due process, no guilty or innocent
until proven otherwise. Um, you essentially have you know, if
you think about This is called the witch craze. And
if you have fingered someone and said that you are
a witch, then you certainly have an audience that is

(31:27):
waiting for you to prove that right. So you have
witch theorist. You have people like Heinrich Kramer who are
coming up with all of the ideas of what should
be happening and essentially what a witch a convicted which
should be telling her interrogator. And then you have an
interrogator whose job it is to go talk to the
witch and get this story out of her. Now, I
believe you have some of the questions to which would

(31:50):
be asked, and we're going to run through those, or
at least some of them real quick, just give you
a taste of what kind of charges were being leveled
and what kind of answers were being sought. And these
are eighteen questions. I'm not gonna go through all of them, obviously,
but um and I think try to take the position
of the person who is accused of being a witch
and having these questions applied to you over and over again,

(32:11):
and which you began to see is that you're being
told in the script right. And I remember again, there
are no witches. Nobody is doing the things that this
this question like put the fiction out of your mind,
all right, So how long have you been a witch?
Why did you become a witch? Why did you become
a witch? And what happened on the occasion? What demon
did you choose to be your lover? What was his name?

(32:32):
What was the name of your master among the evil demons?
What was the oath you were forced to render him?
How it starts to get a little bit more involved
in more more colored here, Um, how did you make
this oath? And what were its conditions? Where did you
consummate your union with your incubus? Because it goes on
and on to say, uh, what is the ointments with

(32:54):
which you rub your broomstick made of? How are you
able to fly through the air? That do all the questions,
but it talks about the cyber than quet every little
detail of what the church thinks is going on with
which craft because the ultimate story here is that the
woman is engaging in sexual relations with a demon. Oftentimes

(33:14):
this will initially start with oh, there, I saw this
handsome fella, and then we started fooling around fella. Yeah,
because that's a that's another important and then if it's
a man being accused, it's a woman. But but it's
never a male demon and a male um human engaging
in sexual activity, because the writers of this is like
the idea of of homosexual relations between even a demon

(33:37):
and a human was was just too much for them
at the time, And that's a whole separate issue. But
the case again would be all right, you you saw
somebody attractive, you started messing around with them, and inevitably
you end up noticing something unnatural about them. Generally they
would have like the feet of a goose. That was
actually in a number of accounts. And the argument here

(33:57):
is that, well, God would never completely one over allowed
the demons to pull one over you completely. You'd have
to have some sort of sign so that the faithful
could back out of it. And then only your sinful
nature would allow you to keep going with this. Right,
so you engage in sexual relations with this demon. You
eventually end up traveling via the air or some sort

(34:18):
of unnatural steed to go to this sabbath where all
the other witches and their demons would gather, and maybe
the Horned One himself would appear before you. But never
would you be engaging in actual relationships with the devil.
Because even though we're we're we're giving a lot of
power to women with these charges of witchcraft, you don't
want to give them too much power. Again, the misogyny

(34:40):
still has to be in play, and you don't want
to imply that, yes, this, uh, this woman on the
edge of town is important enough to actually um mess
around with the Prince of Darkness himself. So it's not
really her power. It's the Prince of darkness, right right,
It's never her power, because heaven forbid, we'd give her
too much power. Likewise, a lot of the things she's
a tribute with, for instance, making men's penises disappear, which

(35:03):
was a big charge along with impotence and various other
things of that nature. With the disappearance of the penis,
it would be a charge of illusion. They're not actually
powerful enough to manipulate physical reality in this instance, but
they can create the illusion of it happening. So you're
giving them tremendous attributing with them tremendous power, but it's
not their power and there are limits on it, and

(35:26):
you can't blame God too much for this happening. So okay,
you have the the script, you have the idea of
what witchcraft is. No doubt that has been bandied about
in pubs and various villages and all sorts of talks about.
Really what we're talking about here is the Boogeyman. So
now you have um, you have to have these questions answered.

(35:46):
We have to have these questions answered. How do you
force someone to answer these questions? Unfortunately, the reality as
you put the screws to them literally literally in most cases. Now,
it's interesting you look at some of the differences between
which for secution in England and which persecution in mainland Europe.
And in mainland Europe they had full use of torture

(36:06):
at their disposal, you name it, they could employ it.
Now you'll look around and on the internet and you
can find any number of lists of horrendous torture devices,
and certainly they're there are a number of inventive and
then sometimes um, possibly fictitious items out there. When when
you really come down to it, though, and if you

(36:27):
really start looking at the history of torture, there are
a number of very basic things that people have been
doing to each other since time out of mind, they're
not that inventive they're not that creative, but they work
their ways to inflict pain and ultimately make the the
tortured individual confess to anything you tell them to. Now

(36:48):
you start, say, using a thumb screw on somebody, they're
gonna scream. They're going to eventually give up on their
principles unless they have some sort of as we discussed
in our Martyrs episode, some sort of extenuating circumstance going
on with their body or their mind, they're gonna they're
going to break and so they're going to confess to anything.
They'll confess to running around with the devil himself. And

(37:08):
that's why the script is provided, because you don't want
them to confess to things that are disagreeable with your
world view, such as the idea that they are best
buds with the demon with the head devil himself. Again,
that doesn't jive with the with the overriding misogyny of
of the claim. So you have to use these questions
to draw unbelievable, untrue things out of the torture victim.

(37:30):
But again coming back to the UK, they did not
have full torture available to them in the persecution of witches.
They actually weren't able to burn witches in England. Yeah,
and in the persecution they were not able to administer
all these different modes of torture. So these stories that
they were able to get out of the the women
in England were different. They were they were more tame.

(37:53):
So while in mainland Europe you'll find just ridiculous accounts
of just all sorts of gory sexual details, you won't
see that as much in UK, which is you'll see
charges of well, she has a weird cat that is
a demonic familiar, and she has a strange nipple on
her body that she's probably milking it with that kind
of thing, while the mainland European which is flying off

(38:16):
and engaging in a demonic orgy, that kind of thing.
But again you're resulting to your physical pain to get
these confessions out of out of many of these women, right,
So you're talking about thumb tacks versus you know, something
like the rack being stretched on the rack um and
the types of confessions that that would come out of
that situation. UM. I wanted to read a quick excerpt

(38:37):
from a letter from accused which Johannes Genius, burgomaster at Bamberg,
who detailed his torture and his confession in a goodbye
letter to his daughter Veronica. Yeah, to set this up,
this was in the Bavaria, all right, And this was
a case where this was no weird outsider in the
edge of town. This was a successful and learned man.

(39:00):
His wife had been executed on on witchcraft charges previously,
and he was an outspoken critic of what was going on,
and eventually, uh surprise, surprise, the witchcraft allegations were leveled
at him as well. So if he writes many hundred
thousand good nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica, innocent? Have I

(39:20):
come into prison? Innocent? Have I been tortured? Innocent? Must
I die? He goes on to talk about some of
some of the conversations he has with his um torture,
and he says, the executioner put the thumb screws on me,
both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out
at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks

(39:40):
I could not use my hands, as you can see
from the writing. Thereafter they first dripped me, bound my
hands behind me, and drew me up in this torpado.
Then I thought heaven and Earth were at an end.
Eight times did they draw me up and let me
fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony, And so
I made my confession, but it was all a lie.

(40:01):
Now follows, dear child, what I confessed in order to
escape the greatest anguish and bitter torture which it was
impossible for me longer to bear. And he goes on
and on to discuss it. So what we're talking about
with estrapado is essentially tying the victim's arms behind his
or her back and then hanging weights to the feet
and hoisting that person into their over and over again

(40:24):
until that person confessed. And obviously arms would come out
of socket. So it is very rough on on the
physical body, and um, absolutely a ton of agony would result. Yeah,
it's a it's a horrible story that of of poor Johannes.
There's another segment from his his letter where he mentions
the executioner leading him back to his prison all right

(40:46):
after after he suffered, and but before he's he's completely broken,
and the executioner says to him, says, sir, I beg you,
for God's sake, confess something, whether it be true or not,
invent something for you cannot endure the torture what will
be put to you, And even if you bear it all,
you will not escape, not even if you were an earl.
But one torture will follow another until you say you

(41:07):
were a witch. Not before that, he said, will they
let you go? As you may see by all the trials,
for one is just like another. So and and that's
that's key there too. And Walter Stevens in his book
really points out that that I did it. One trial
is just like another. This is a factory industry. Here
there is a process with a desired result, with a

(41:28):
desired confession that that has to be met too to
carry out this idea and to make this idea real
in everyone's minds. Well and not you don't have just
a Malle's Mouth carum as a text. You also you
have many other texts out there there are reinforcing this
idea of which is in the hammer and having to

(41:48):
to really use brute force. I mean, it's kind of
like when you think today about anyone who has a
fringe idea, whether it's a belief in Bigfoot or some
sort of crazy left or right wing conspiracy theory. They
have a shelf of books devoted to that. They have
website sites they can go to. Maybe they even have
you know, a TV channel they can they can turn

(42:10):
into as well to have those ideas reinforced. And again
for the for the witch theorists, the worst witch persecutors,
and just the average joe. Even there, there's a lot
of material out there to back up this world view.
That's right. So you're exactly right. So if you think
about Bigfoot today and all the sort of sort of
information that's out there that can try to construct this
story for you, um, with absolutely very similitude, the same

(42:33):
thing as going on is this confirmation bias, totally completely
trying to select texts and ideas that line up with witchcraft.
And I wanted to read this this quick excerpt from
text called Strips by Jian Fresco uh Pico della Mirandola,
and he says, um, speaking of a hammer, he says,

(42:54):
theologians will tell you that these things can be done
by the by the devil. And you can understand many
examples from the book of Germans Friar Heinrich and Friar Jacob,
excellent theologians of the Dominican order called the hammer, and
you can have this hammer if you want to use
it against those who are hard headed and do not
want to believe the truth, So you can either bend
them to believe what they are supposed to or else

(43:16):
smash them into a hundred thousand pieces. Yeah, again, this
is this idea that is fueling all these atrocities. So
if you look back at this time period and it
just seems too ghastly to be true, you have to
remember again these texts are informing confirmation bias, but also
cognitive dissonance is at play. Yeah, this is really important.

(43:39):
You mentioned the texts that people are coming back to
because again they're they're having to work really hard, and
this was something that did not exist a four fourteen hundred.
They do bring this ridiculous idea into the world that
again would have been not just not just talking as
a modern observer, this would have been ridiculous pre fourteen hundred.
That you have to enforce this idea and make a labored,
intensive k for it being true. So they're turning to

(44:03):
all of the text they're finding support in the Bible,
and obviously there's some places there where you can find
some meat for the idea of female which is but
then they're turning inevitably to Aristotle. Aristotle was the most
revered of the the the old philosophers, among the learned
in medieval times, like this was this was the guy, right,
his observations about life and observable reality and speculations on

(44:27):
on things beyond that they ring true, and this man
was really esteemed for the way that he viewed the world. Well,
he was hybeological and very much into categorizing everything and
making sense of the world and cataloging it. Yeah, but
it's it's really difficult, if not impossible, I mean, really
it's impossible in several places to unify the works of

(44:49):
Aristotle with Christian theology. All right, that didn't didn't stop
people from trying. But ultimately with Aristotle you find that,
i mean, Aristotle did not believe in the immortality of
the human soul. And of course, yeah, a big part
problem because most of Christianity is about the fact that
when we die there is something else, that there's something
immortal in ourselves and in the world. So you see

(45:13):
a certain amount of cognitive dissonance there where someone is
is saying, hey, Aristotle is great. Christianity is the thing
that defines my life. But in between, there's this burning question,
these two things. Why don't these two things go together?
What is wrong? But we've talked about cognitive distance before.
It's the idea that you have two conflicting opinions going
at it in your mind and how do you deal

(45:33):
with those? And again, the Middle Ages don't think of
it as a completely unenlightened time. It was an age
in which you had clever individuals, educated individuals trying to
figure out how the world works. And while there wasn't
really a huge population of atheists in Europe at the time,
there was still a lot of doubt. There was a
lot of trouble to believe, because ultimately, you're born into

(45:56):
this story, this religious story of how the world works
and what it means and what your places in it,
and there's not really an outside to that. There's it's
not like today, like if if you're born into Christianity,
you grow older and you can say, well, I'm actually
maybe not Catholic anymore, maybe I'm Protestant. Alright, fine, you
can make that transition. You can say I don't really

(46:16):
feel Protestant anymore. I feel like I want to explore
Buddhism or Hinduism, or maybe I'm just completely agnostic. That's fine.
They're groups for all of those, and in other words,
there's like a meeting you can go to for each
of those. It is support group. But within within Catholic
Europe of the time, there was Catholicism and there was

(46:38):
the outside, which was damnation, so it was harder to
wrap your head around. You couldn't just choose the path
that agreed with you the most, so a lot of
people were struggling with belief. In fact, French historian Lucien
Febre argued that the sixteenth century and the three or
four preceding centuries were quote centuries that wanted to believe

(47:00):
and despite what we may think, and despite what they
even wrote. There might have been a few pure blighted atheists,
but there was no shortage of apathy, agnosticism, and doubt.
So you talked about cognitive dissonance, and I'm thinking about
how you're going to react in one of two ways
if you're met with cognitive dissonance. So if you have
one idea about the world and then something comes along

(47:20):
and it's the opposite of that, you're either going to
have a sea change of opinion, or you're going to
somehow try to fit that into your worldview even though
it doesn't really make sense. So I think about Thomas
Aquinas in terms of this, because he was very into Aristotle,
and the reason why it was so important to a
Klinus in the church is because Aristotle gave the kind

(47:44):
of order that the church needed, an order to to
really formalize what they were trying to put forth to
the public their doctrines. And so only that, but you know,
there's a bit of appropriation of the esteem of Aristotle
is Oh, so that's why you see this happenings, why
you see the convergent of these two different ideas and

(48:07):
the need to get some sort of order in place
so that you can formalize these ideas and make it
seem authoritative. And one of the ideas, I mean, the
the key idea that Walter Stevens pushes in Demon Lovers
comes down to the idea that in the midst of
this what is essentially a crisis of belief, you have

(48:28):
an age where people are born into a religion that
they're finding that they're doubting. That doesn't completely jive yet
with the world and it's not working the way it should.
But there's no outside, there's no legitimate way to establish
a different version of how the world works. They have
to make this one work. So what can you do?
What can you do to prove to yourself that there
is a supernatural that there that there are angels, and

(48:49):
that there is a God, and ultimately that your own
soul is immortal and not something that dies with your body.
So this version of Christianity needs witchcraft, right, and I
mean it's uh. And that that's the actual words of
John Wesley, founder of Methodism. In seventy eight, he argued
that quote giving up witchcraft is in effect the giving
up of the Bible. Now that's how that's after the

(49:12):
witchcraft craze finally huffs its last breath. Uh for that period.
But certainly the argument Walter Stevens makes here is that
essentially the theorist, the witchcraft theorists, the Hinrich Kramers of
the time, they were kind of like not NASA scientist,
forming these ideas of how the world beyond our planet works,
all right, And then the tortures you can think of

(49:33):
them as the astronauts, the individuals that are sent out
to gain that proof. And how are you going to
gain proof? How can you possibly gain proof of the supernatural,
something that is by its very nature invisible and as
an article of faith. Well, you have these witches. And
if you can somehow get a witch, especially lots and
lots of witches, to testify, to confess that they have

(49:53):
had physical sexual relations with a demon, with a supernatural being,
with a fall an angel, then she has an expert witness.
She's providing expert testimony to the existence of the supernatural,
to the existence of God, to the immortality of the
human soul. And so, in a in a twisted, just horrible,
just heartbreaking way, you have a half a million women

(50:16):
die because a bunch of broken, renegade Christians doubt their
own faith. Well, but also appeasing this idea of magical
thinking right sating people's thirst for this idea that right
can be wronged and that the unexplained can be explained
in this very simple way. As she is a witch.

(50:38):
Therefore my leaf stock died. At the same time, you're
distracting from political problems, you're distracting from poverty, from a
host of issues that should be on the mind of
the average person, but instead their mind is occupied with witchcraft. Well,
and I think that what is truly evil about this
is that these people, these clergymen, were staring in the
faces of innocence as young as seven years old, seven

(51:00):
years old, as young as seven year old, convicted of
having sexual activity with the demon and then executed for it.
And so again you get this idea of cognitive dissonance.
What do you do when you are met with that
sort of innocence, You double down on your beliefs, and
particularly if you again return to the line of Exodus,

(51:20):
Thou shalt not permit a sorceress to live, and you
feel as though you are the representative of God on earth,
carrying out God's wishes. Yeah, we're shaking our heads. Yeah,
I mean, it's it's horrible stuff. I mean, in Walter
Stephen's book, he he makes a very thorough case for
the importance of that physical relationship between the witch and
the demon in virtually every witchcraft text that came out,

(51:45):
including Malie's Malificarum, where it's it's it's not only making
the argument that women are are having physical relations with demons,
but it's having to create the idea that they could,
because prior to four hundred it was also largely thought
that demons did not have physical bodies, so they were
purely spirit. So they had to rewrite um metaphysics to

(52:06):
to to have that makes sense. They had to figure
out what kind of body would a demon have? How
would it come to have a body? Would it be
composed of air, would it be composed of some different
form of flesh? How would this possibly happen? Because they
needed it to happen so badly well, and cast doubt
on women in every single enterprise of their life, should
including midwiffery, in which then you know, of midwife, we

(52:30):
become suspect because it would think you would think that
if she were delivering your baby should be offering up
to the demon. You know. So there's a lot of
different things that play um. But I think what we
find ourselves with today is this legacies of angels and
demons and this idea of women as which is um
that that continues just to flavor the fabric of our society. Yeah,

(52:54):
because I mean, certainly the misogyny still exists, the magical
thinking still exists of in not only much of the world,
but in everyday life. There's a certain magic of magical thinking.
I don't care how steeped in skepticism you are, you're
gonna engage in a little bit of magical thinking. At
least when you see somebody draw a smiley face on
the wall, you're gonna see a human face there. I mean,
it's just on a very basic level, we think magically.

(53:16):
But then, just as the post fourteen hundred world was
an age of of religious doubt and change and technological innovation,
I mean we continue to see that every every day
in our modern lives. Every age has to have to
have the same crisises that emerge of where we have
to doubt what we've been taught and and somehow come
to terms with with what the world is showing us.

(53:37):
And you see people that resisted that again double down
to that cognitive dissonance. So I mean, just think to
your own self, Think to the politics you see on
the TV every day, to what depths would would you fall?
What hellish crimes would you commit in order to cling
to a faith that deep down, or to a political
idea or what have you that you no longer really believe.
What would you become in order to maintain that barrier

(54:01):
between your worldview and the outside, you know, in order
to defeat the steaming of cognitive distance. Yeah, and as
Erica Jonging says that witchcraft is, it doesn't. It's not
something that just went away. It just sort of re arises, uh,
from time period of time period under a different guys. Um.
So I did want to point this out to that

(54:22):
if you're interested in in learning more about witchcraft, at
least in modern times, um, you can check out an
HBO documentary Saving Africa's which is. It's a two thousand
and ten documentary and and actually talked about the plight
of young Nigerians branded as which is some as young
as three months old, and some of some of these
ideas that continue to pervade different cultures. Also, be sure

(54:45):
to check out which is by Erica jong Um. It
has some incredible illustrations. It is a wonderful history of
which is and John also has some great poems in
there as well. Um. The illustrations are wonderful as well.
But the one in the cover, like Julie brought it
to my desk, and that covers a little hippie dippie
looking because at first glance you only see this this

(55:06):
very sort of flowers and goodness pagan which at the top,
but then it becomes a more of a hag at
the bottom. So when I first saw it, I'm like, oh,
this is some sort of this is not really necessarily
gonna be in keeping with a lot of what we're
talking about, but but it's it's really great. And then
the illustrations inside the book, Uh, trust me, there are
plenty of goat men and naked ladies prancing around for

(55:26):
for any reader to find interesting. And the content is excellent.
And again, Walter Stephen's Demon Lover is a great book
if you want to a deeper dive into that whole
discussion of the importance of physical contact between a witch
and a demon. It's a great book, but it's also
kind of a it's kind of a heavy read, so
I don't recommend that to everybody. But I would like

(55:47):
to close out with a quote from Walter Stevens in
the book, where he's he's looking forward from the medieval
ages and looking to our own age and again talking
about the energy that that perpetrated and and propped up
these atrocity and how that energy is still alive in society. Today,
He says, the insecurities that produced experiments with witches are
not a thing of the past. Both witchcraft theory and

(56:09):
scholastic natural philosophy resemble the creation science of late twentieth
century Christian fundamentalist All three attempt to make knowledge of
the physical world conform to the most literal possible interpretation
of the Bible. This is always an exercise and damage controlled.
How much of the Good Book can be salvaged when
experience collides with tradition and authority. So there you have it.

(56:31):
If you have anything you would like to share, if
you have something something about which culture today, about how
we view the idea of a witch, I'm sure we
have some wicked listeners out there. We would love to
hear from you. Guys and gals. Let us know what
you think about the legacy of the witch in human society,
and if anyone has anything I would like to share
their thoughts on the history of which persecution and what

(56:53):
it meant the various things that made these atrocities happen.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
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at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands

(57:19):
of other topics, Is It How Stuff Works dot com