#witchcraze

Kramer and Sprenger gave abundant reasons to justify the gynocidal maniacs who controlled society and culture. They explained that witches turn men into beasts, copulate with devils, raise and stir up hailstorms and tempests. The witch/ woman-killers appeared "perfectly" justified, since the priest professionals had posed the question: "Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions?" The question itself set the framework for the answer. The reader was informed that women are more credulous, that they are naturally more impressionable, have slippery tongues, are feebler both in mind and body, are more carnal than men (!) to the extent of having insatiable lust, have weak memories, are liars by nature. Then—without missing a beat, after hammering home their view that women are feeble in every sense—these Sado-Sages add that "nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women."

Those who acted as henchmen in hunting out, torturing, and killing women as witches could argue correctly that they were serving the Higher Order of patriarchy and were acting "under orders." The papal Bull of Innocent VIII, Summis desiderantes affectibus (1484), was a document of the highest authority, giving the support of Rome to "Our dear sons," the dominican Inquisitors, Kramer and Sprenger, who were encountering opposition to the witch persecutions. This papal document had been purposefully solicited by the two dominicans to legitimate their attempt to launch the witchcraze in the Rhineland. As Trevor-Roper points out:

Having obtained it, they printed it in their book, as if the book had been written in response to the bull. The book thus advertised to all Europe both the new epidemic of witchcraft and the authority which had been given them to suppress it.

Here we see very conscious manipulation of legitimation from on high by the Inquisitors. Given the "go ahead" from Innocent, they had perfect justification for carrying out orders. More than that: Innocent had made it clear that "Our venerable Brother, the Bishop of Strasburg . . . shall threaten all who endeavor to hinder or harass the Inquisitors, all who oppose them . . . [with] terrible penalties." Thus ecclesiastical power was used to erase responsibility for opposing the witch persecutions, even for speaking against them. Although Innocent's Bull itself refers to "many persons of both sexes" as having "abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi," the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum manage to totally erase this idea, while at the same time retaining the full support of "Innocent" in their war against women. Thus the "dear Sons"—the real leaders of the witch-hunting brotherhood—were the power behind the throne of the Holy Father.

In the witchcraze, then, we can see the truth of Helen Diner's insight that "in Christianity the tree becomes the torture cross of the world." Under the Sign of the Cross good and wise women were tortured and burned to death. Trees were killed and their wood used to make the fires that would devour these women. Under the reign of the Torture Cross Society, the Tree of Life—the divine Self-centering life of independent women—was cut down and consumed. The citizens of the city of god created, staged, and acted out the christian hell on earth. Their theology expressd itself as demonology; their reigning philosophy became an ontology of the damned. No one was responsible for this evil except the victims, who were perceived not as victims of their murderers, but of the devil. Innocent and his "dear Sons" were servants of god, burning with innocence.

We've all heard the saying, "We are the daughters of the witches they couldn't burn", but what if we actually looked at who those witches were? In this episode, we explore the impact of antisemitism on the witchcraze and how Jews as a whole suffered through the persecution of so-called witches.

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This actually has historical evidence! A distinctly English feature of witchcraft was the existence of the familiar. It was believed the familiars fed off the blood of witches and therefore the way to "prove" someone was a witch was to check for a witch's mark: the location where the familiar bit into her. The reading I did for uni suggested it could be perceived as a 3rd nipple (not least because of the parallels to nursing a child, only it was the devil)

Therefore Mary has a 3rd nipple because ~historical referencing~ and obviously Mary hasn't ever spoken directly about the trial but she's made occasional reference to it so its easy enough to misconstrude something. Or alternatively she told Robin when they fucked and Robin just causally mentions that particular aspect just cos, particularly because neither of them are restrained by the same physical shame of Fanny etc.

Fife student Len Pennie, one of the rising stars of Scotland’s poetry scene thanks to her daily posts on Twitter, has described their treatment as “state-sanctioned murder of innocent folks” in a powerful new video.

It includes a pledge to “demand justice” for all those who were tortured and tried when the Witchcraft Act was law in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries, branding it “a punishment lacking a crime.”

The 21-year-old was commissioned by campaigners fighting to secure a pardon, apology and new national memorial for all those accused, convicted and executed between 1563 and 1736.The film featuring her poem, In Memorial, was launched to coincide with the Scottish Parliament being formally asked to right a “terrible miscarriage of justice” suffered by almost 4000 Scots accused of witchcraft, the vast majority of whom were women.

The poem includes the lines: “Noo yer’re deid but never gone, hen, there’s them that still carry yer name

“There’s them that mind ciminals bidin in courts, heids that should hing heavy wae shame

"Auld Nick didnae ken ye fae Eve, hen, ye had but yer ain eyes tae see

“The wrang wasnae yours, the guilt was misplaced, yer innocence plain as can be.”

The petition lodged with the Scottish Parliament by the Witches of Scotland campaign, which is being led by QC Claire Mitchell and author Zoe Venditozzi, suggests that Scotland had five times as many witch trials as anywhere else in Europe.

Their petition states: “As with elsewhere in Europe, the vast majority of those accused, some 85 per cent were women. The stripping and pricking of women was common, as was sleep deprivation. Most confessed and that was used as the basis for their conviction. The method of execution was by way of strangulation and then burning at the stake.

Pennie’s poem goes on: “Yer soul’s noo at peace wae the earth, hen, sleep and be wan wae the sky

"We’ll scrieve yer name in books they cannae burn, write a legacy never tae die

“But we willnae just beg ae yer pardon, hen, those days have lang ceased tae exist

“We noo demand justice fur aw those lit you, lang gone but eternally missed.”

Pennie, who has amassed more than 70,000 followers on Twitter in the last few months, has had her work championed by actor Michael Sheen, author Neil Gaiman, playwright David Greig and comic Janey Godley in recent months.

She also starred alongside broadcaster Edith Bowman, writer and broadcaster Billy Kay and comic Janey Godley in the National Trust for Scotland’s virtual Burns Supper last month.

Mitchell said: “Zoe Venditozzi and I wanted to mark the presentation of the petition to the Scottish Parliament to seek a pardon, apology and national monument."

We thought that Len Pennie was the obviously choice as a brilliant Scots poet who uses the Scots language. We were delighted when she agreed to write a poyum for us.

The extension of the witchcraze geographically has already been noted. Its extension over time is an even more complex and horrifying phenomenon. We have seen that the massacre reached its peak in the first half of the seventeenth century and then petered out when the stereotype "deteriorated" to the point of threatening to include too many "people." However, this was not the end of the horror. In order to begin to comprehend the temporal expansion of the effects of the witchcraze, it is vital to consider the use and abuse of children in connection with the witchburnings, for the horrors branded upon their memories must have carried over for many generations. We are informed that "by law, children who were said to have attended their mother to the Sabbat were merely [sic] flogged in front of the fire in which their parent was burn-ing." It is probable that the majority of these children were girls. These daughters saw their mothers burned alive.* This is the other side of the mother-daughter tragedy in patriarchy. Not only have daughters been maimed by their mothers, but they have from early childhood seen them in the process of being tortured and killed.

In the witch trials, moreover, children were often used as legal witnesses. As Ronald Seth pointed out, the witchcraft judge Jean Bodin “openly declared that he used children as witnesses because at a very young age they could without difficulty be persuaded or compelled to inform against the accused." The word of children from seven upwards was regarded as sufficient testimony for fatal condemnation. This was part of the exceptional nature of the witch trials. As Seth writes:

To make it possible for children to give evidence before the courts in witchcraft trials, the rules regarding children as witnesses, which applied to all other forms of judicial proceedings and laid down that no witness below the age of fourteen could be heard, were suspended.

This enforced active/instrumental role of children sheds further light upon the demonic distortion of women's minds by the witchcraze. For a daughter to remember seeing her mother burned was one thing. To remember all her life that she had been used to accuse and condemn her mother to death, that she had in effect committed matricide, would have meant carrying a burden of self-loathing that is almost unimaginable. Such children would have branded this self-hatred upon their daughters and upon generations that followed. Thus the presence of young girls both as helpless "observers" at the burnings and as legal witnesses at the trials may effectively have perpetuated the lesson of the witchcraze down through the centuries into this, our "own," time. Without knowledge and consent women are trained to continue the ritual murder of female divinity, burning the witch within themselves and each other. In order to stop this silent continuation of the witchcraze—a continuation that has been foreseen and planned by such men as Jean Bodin—it is necessary to break the silences and deceptions of "history."

* In a discussion about the effects of this, one woman made the point that it must have broken the minds of small girls to such an extent that all female identification, all capacity for confident bonding with women, would have been effectively destroyed. Then someone else remarked that these daughters no doubt drew the logical conclusion that "it is better to marry than to burn." The ensuing laughter provided brief relief from the intensity of our realization of what had been done to our foresisters and consequently to us all.

When we examine the role of printing as a means for spreading the witchcraze we see that it reinforced an evolving hierarchy based upon a developing technology and upon controlled access to officially acknowledged learning. Moreover, we should note that the original demonologies were printed in Latin, the language of formally educated, professional men. Thus it is not surpising to read the following:

It [the craze] was forwarded by the cultivated Popes of the Renaissance, by the great Protestant Reformers, by the saints of the Counter-Reformation, by the scholars, lawyers, and churchmen of the age of Scaliger and Lipsius, Bacon and Grotius, Berulle and Pascal.

Clearly, then, it was not merely the wealthy but the "cultivated"—and most specifically the rising professional power block—who forwarded the witch-hunts. The latter led the battle against Hags:

Laymen might not accept all the esoteric details supplied by the experts, but they accepted the general truth of the theory, and because they accepted its general truth, they were unable to argue against its more learned interpreters. So the experts effectively commanded the field. For two centuries the clergy preached against witches and the lawyers sentenced them. . . . Confessors and judges were supplied with manuals incorporating all the latest information . . .

This phenomenon of leadership and control by "experts" is familiar to inhabitants of modern Western society. It is not surprising, then, that there was not only a "body" of expert knowledge, but also popularized propaganda for the masses. Here again technology, in the form of printing, was an essential means of mental artificial insemination. A new genre of literature emerged in the form of Teufelsbücher, or "devil books," whose general effect was "to suggest that the devil was everywhere." It is obvious who were considered to be the primary cohorts and agents of the devil in christian society. As Caputi points out, the message to the masses was imprinted especially through the woodcuts and engravings of the period. One needs only to glance through a sampling to see that women are typically represented as dupes of the devil. One did not have to know Latin to read the German Teufelsbücher, and did not have to be literate at all to get the message of the woodcuts. Then, as today, the messages of the professional experts were professionally embedded in the minds of the masses through "mass market" editions. Phallotechnic society had launched its first massive campaign against dangerous women—a campaign whose escalated echoes haunt us today in the ubiquitous "mass media": the films, slick magazines, television, billboards, newspapers, textbooks, and other "literature" which carry overt and subliminal images of rape, dismemberment, and gynocide.

We can now approach the question of just who were the women who were so horrifying to the learned experts who created, controlled, and legitimated the witchcraze. An essential clue is to be found in the abandonment, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, of the legal distinction between the "good" and the "bad" witch. In 1563 the Scottish witch-law dropped this distinction, and soon after, the laws on the continent and finally in England also changed. The purest expression of the ideology behind this legal change was uttered by the Cambridge preacher, William Perkins, who maintained that whoever has made a pact with the devil, even to do good, must die. Perkins declared that the "good witch [was] a more horrible and detestable monster than the bad." Thus, "if death be due to any . . . then a thousand deaths of right belong to the good witch." The logic here is impeccable. On an overt level it expresses the fact that of course the christians will(ed) to destroy real female-identified goodness, that is, the independence, strength, wisdom, and learning through which Hags (healers, counselors, wise women, teachers) earned the respect of the people.

The import of the apparently convoluted thinking which saw the good witch as more evil than the bad witch should not be lost upon Hags. As Denise Connors has pointed out, since such women gained (and gain) respect for their work, their competence shows up the incompetence of the legitimated professionals. The competition is intolerable, and the professionals cannot maintain their prestige.* Clearly they are not willing to attribute such wisdom and healing power to the native talent and superiority of women. During the witchcraze the solution was to attribute female power to the "fact" that they were tools of the devil, the rival of the christian god, that is, of males themselves. Thus, the combination of spiritual and medical knowledge made good witches the epitome of "evil" to the christian persecutors.

* It is enlightening to recall the "archaic" definition of the term prestige. According to Merriam-Webster, it meant a conjurer's trick: illusion, deception. It is helpful to remember this definition when hearing of the "prestige" of such institutions (and their products) as Harvard Medical School, Yale Divinity School, M.I.T., et al.

Unlike the patriarchs who invented and legitimated foot-binding and genital mutilation, however, the wholly christian fathers and sons generally did not use mothers as the primary instruments of the physical torture of their daughters. Rather, they used mothers and daughters as witnesses against each other. In addition, they vampirized the power inherent in the Mother as symbol, naming their persecuting institution "Mother Church." Thus on a mythic/symbolic level they attempted to warp the deepest feelings of women—all of whom are, of course, daughters snarling these feelings into Self-contradictory love-hate. In the witchcraze, males used the Mother symbol to cover their own motives of sadism and control. Instead of using physical female bodies to carry out the acts of torture and murder, the christian fathers used the institutional Body of Mother Church. This Mystical Body, the church, which was also known as the "Bride of Christ," was/is the false "Mother" used to destroy female-identified Selves. In carrying out this destruction the fathers and sons invoked the "Mother of God"—the robotized replica of The Goddess—who had been tamed and re-named, made into a reminder of their need to keep on maiming, raping, and killing female divinity.