Burned alive: the fate of thousands of women killed in Europe's witch-hunt mania

By DAVID MYTON

One of the most appalling events (among many) in modern history is the witch-hunt mania that gripped Europe in the 16^th-17th centuries, leading to the horrific deaths of many thousands of innocent women.

In his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay observed that people seemed to get swept up in what he termed “moral epidemics”.

“They think in herds and go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one,” he said.

Mackay writes that for hundreds of years the word “witch” was on everybody's tongues. The people of England, Scotland, France and Germany “went mad on the subject”, holding so many trials for witchcraft that real crimes went unnoticed.

“Many thousands of women fell victim to this cruel and absurd delusion,” he says.

In Germany, for example, more than 600 people a year - two every day – were executed for this pretend offence.

The malevolent force behind witchcraft - the one who supposedly gave it power - was the Devil, to whom, it was said, the witch renounced baptism and sold her immortal soul.

Mackay is not an apologist at all for the witch hunters, but he does attempt to contextualize it within the available knowledge at the time. After all, in any era, including our own, we don’t know what we don’t know.

Humans feel, he says, that they have within them a spirit that never dies, and all our experience of this life makes us cling to this hope.

But “in the early days of little knowledge” this grand belief became the source of a whole train of superstitions “from which flowed a deluge of blood and horror”.

For more than 250 years, Europe brooded on the idea that not only parted spirits walked the Earth to meddle in human affairs; but that humans had the power to summon evil spirits to their aid and to work woe upon their fellows.

It was believed that the Earth “swarmed with millions of demons of both sexes, which increased and multiplied … evil spirits were so numerous they couldn’t be counted”. Furthermore, these spirits could and did spread pain, diseases, and terrible dreams.

As an epidemic of terror took hold of entire societies, nobody thought themselves secure from the machinations of the Devil and his agents, writes Mackay.

“Every calamity that befell them they attributed to a Witch. If a storm wrecked their barn, if their cattle got sick, if a beloved relative died, or if they themselves got sick” – well, it wasn’t simply bad luck “but the works of some neighbouring hag whose wretchedness or insanity caused the ignorant to raise their finger and pointed at her as a witch”.

The witch-hunt mania began in earnest from 1485 under Pope Innocent, who was “sincerely alarmed” at the vast number of witches supposedly practising their maleficent arts.

And so in 1488 he called on the nations of Europe to rescue the Church from the perils and horrors of Satan.

The Devil, said the Pope, encouraged both men and women to have sex with “infernal fiends”, which caused numerous stillbirths and destroyed crops, fruit trees and cattle.

These “fiends” were witches - and so the Pope appointed Inquisitors in every country “who made it their sole business to find and eliminate the witches”.

Under torture, these poor women confessed to such things as midnight rendezvous with the Devil, attending Witches’ Sabbath, raising whirlwinds and calling down lightning, and particularly horrifying - having sex at midnight with Satan.

Found guilty, as they usually were, they would be burned alive. And so it went year after year, for years on end – “the fires for the execution of witches blazing in almost every town in Europe”.

A number of male wizards were also executed for such things as attending “saturnalian orgies with fiends” and preparing “infernal unguents for the blighting of cattle and crops”.

Mackay notes also that the Protestants were just as eager to hunt witches as Catholics, with both Martin Luther and John Calvin “zealously encouraging the persecution of witches”.

The witch-hunt mania surged throughout continental Europe and also in Scotland and England at this time.

In 1562 Queen Elizabeth I recognised witchcraft as “a crime of the highest magnitude”, although in fact many women faced “mob justice” and were executed without so much as a show trial.

By the mid-1600s England had its own chief Witch Finder General - a certain Matthew Hopkins – a man with the uncanny ability to discover “the mark of the Devil” on numerous women across the country, whom he then had burned at the stake.

The Witch Finder General travelled from town to town, “always residing at the very best inn” and charging 20 shillings a time for his witch-finding services.

So it went, year after dismal year, many hundreds of unfortunate women “suffering the most terrible persecution and ghastly execution”.

The mania slowly faded, although Mackay notes that even in the mid-1800s - at the time of his writing this book - the superstition that witches were real still lingered to “an almost inconceivable extent”, although nobody at that time was getting burned alive.

The history of the witch-hunts and the fiery executions is a truly terrible, awful chapter of history. But what we must understand is that then people believed witchcraft was real.

They believed “in the tangible existence of demons and devils and black magic”.

The problem with a delusion in any era – ours included - is that we don’t know when we are deluded.

The British historian Norman Stone, writing in 1995, said that Mackay’s book is as relevant today as it was more than 100 years ago because “folly changes only in detail and not in scale”.

* Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995. (Originally published in 1841)