-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and
Multiple Personality Disorder
Craig Lockwood©1993
CompCare Publishers
3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100
Minneapolis, MN 55441
612.559.4800/800.328.3330
ISBN 0-89638-363-6
255+pps — out-of-print/one edition.
-----
A very interesting and excellent book.
Om
K
--[14]--
Chapter 14
Unholy Inquistion
"Moreover I saw under the sun that in the place of justice,
even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness,
even there was wickedness. "
-Ecclesiastes, 3:16
Knowing what the average person thought seven or eight hundred years ago is
difficult. Most people were illiterate and left no records. We can be sure,
however, that they believed in witchcraft and sorcery, as did the educated
who did leave records. Peasants, clerics, and nobles alike felt they had
every reason to fear those who might practice such arts.
In the spiritual evolution of Satan, the thirteenth century was an important
period. Weary from humiliation and defeat in the Crusades, infected with
deeply rooted ecclesiastic corruption at home, the pious fathers of Rome
hunkered down to save the sinking ark of the church from the blasphemous
Pagan idolaters.
Back at work were those interminable pests, the heretics—this time in the
form of several Manichaean sects who had slipped in over the Carpathians from
Bulgaria. Prominent among these were the Cathari, Albigenses (Cathars who
lived in the Albi region), and the Waldenses.
Manichaean doctrine eschewed materiality and emphasized the relationship
between the coexisting forces of spiritual good and carnal evil. Man's only
redemptive hope was the expurgation of evil by denying carnality—in any form.
Sex once again reared its conveniently licentious head. Cathars were accused
by Rome of the church's favorite unnatural act, sodomy—this time with animals.
Sodomy, according to numerous contemporary documents, was one act the pious
fathers were more than familiar with, since celibacy wasn't rigidly enforced.
So goat abuse can account for only a tiny part of the reason. The more
important reasons were economic. These heretics were gaining converts, and
the church was losing tithes.
Perhaps there was an element of truth to the accusations. Perhaps Cathari
elders, realizing that not all of the laity could repress their sexuality,
considered the inevitable consequences, rolled their eyes, and gave a
shrugging sanction. This way, at least, no overriding doctrine was violated,
and no doctrinally impure progeny arrived.
Pope Innocent III sent troops against the Manichaeans in the early years of
the thirteenth century. Up into the high Alpine valleys they marched, down
through the dark forests.
"Neither sex, nor age, nor rank have we spared," stated the general who
conducted the genocide against the Albigenses. "We have put all alike to the
sword."[1]
Peasants, Prelates, and Promiscuity
But the overtaxed, suppressed peasants who weren't heretics, who had provided
their lives for the Crusades, their labor for their feudal lords, and their
souls for Rome, were also suspect. Yes, they served the church, showed up for
Mass, and paid their tithes and tributes with downcast eyes. But just what
were they doing at night?
If Rome's pious fathers could be sure of anything, they could be sure it
involved sex. What else did the peasantry have left that feudal lord and
Church hadn't appropriated?
But sex had always been involved. Peasants lead lives close to the earth.
Fertility was a constant concern—crops, animals, and little peasants to take
over when mum and dad got on in years. So peasants were earthy.
Late Paleolithic hunters and herders, the peasant's ancestors, had lived or
died by the fecundity of their mammals and meadows. And to ensure that
fertility came, each spring and fall hunters, and later herders, performed
the rituals they believed would ensure fertility's coming.
Whatever form the local god and goddess took, whatever names their tribal
cults went by, they commonly mingled human and animal characteristics.
Topped with stag's antlers or aurochs's horns, wearing pelts symbolically
bedecked with flowers, silhouetted against a great fire, the horned god and
goddess figures would enact before the gathered tribe the cosmo-magical law
of imitation: like attracting symbolic-like, beckoning fertility in sexual
union.
Drumming and dancing, feasting, perhaps ingesting narcotic substances from
plants, and probably having sex were part of these rituals of great power and
magic.
Repeated century after century, the ritual of fertility made an indelible
impression on the Paleolithic psyche, perpetuating a mythic archetype. Some
researchers are even claiming this spiritual impulse may have been encoded
into our genes. So, as long as people still lived close to the land, the myth
survived.
Tribes and peoples come and go. Nature thins them with disease, drought,
famine, failure of food source, or climate. Then, the miracle of continuity
occurs.
Somehow stragglers survive or are taken as slaves into another tribe. Somehow
their myths, like their genes, survive too, for Nature is above all
conservative. Nothing is wasted—especially myths, which so economically
explain the awesome mysteries of human existence.
Was the Sabbat, or something like it, a Pagan folk myth reenacted as ritual?
Or was it rustic nose-thumbing at a church whose priests spoke an unknowable
language, and ordained and supervised an unbearable feudal status quo?
Sabbats, or whatever they were called by those who participated, seem at
first to have echoed the ancient Pagan nature-ritual festivals based on the
May/November calendar year—not the astrological year of equinoxes and
solstices or the agricultural planting year.
What were they like?
In England and Europe's latitudes, it stays light late in summer. Of a
certain evening at twilight (word had gotten around), people would start
appearing in ones and twos.
By a roaring bonfire deep in a remote forest clearing and a poached deer on a
spit, a local person whose family claimed they remember the old Celtic
ways—or at least some of themprepared to sacrifice a piglet, goat, or sheep
on a rock altar.
As the sacrificial animal was led toward the altar, a prank-playing practical
joker may have improvised an obscene satiric skit—about the local prelate
satisfying his perverted sexual appetite or possibly a giggling parody of the
Mass.
Then the animal was sacrificed and solemn offerings of thanks were
given—blood and words, the ancient formula. Next came the feast accompanied
with berry wines, grain beer, and, perhaps, a purloined cask of the baron's
wine.
Later, dancers moved wildly and sensually to the music played on drums and
simple instruments. The horned god and goddess would embrace. Lust and
laughter and sweating bodies mingled.
But was this a Sabbat? And if so, where did the devil come from?
Paganizing Satan
Earlier, during the Middle Ages, perhaps in an effort to control what they
saw as growing tendencies towards heresy or a Pagan revival, Church scholars
began the process of blending Satan with Pagan traditions where possible.
Pagan religious myth had perpetuated a strong relationship to nature. Pagan
belief posited that certain hills and mountains, watercourses and rock
outcroppings, contained spirits or forces responsible for attracting certain
spiritual powers. European and British folk customs retained elements of
these ancient Pagan beliefs.
Caesar and Tacitus more than a thousand years before, according to Stewart
Piggott in his book The Druids, had written of Druid priests meeting in such
places to perform rituals and human sacrifices. Locations of this type, which
couldn't be religiously annexed, were eventually proscribed by the Church.
Where possible, canny churchmen had exercised their religious hegemony and
appropriated these places, naming them for the saint or holy person most
appropriate to the area. Sometimes converts themselves renamed the spot.
Shrines, churches, and cathedrals were often built over places that had
served for centuries as venues of Pagan worship.
But since the Crusades, things had gotten worse. Returning veterans who'd
known the freedom of long campaigns could no longer be as easily yoked as
serfs. Under the Holy Land's stars, their lords and masters had relied on
them as fighting men, not just beasts of burden.
Things were changing. Currents of attitude and behavior were shifting. And
when things change too fast for those in power to adjust to and retain their
wealth and position, someone has to pay.
Pursuing the Perfect Patsies
"A great deal of snow fell during the month of February," relates the
anonymous chronicler of the monastery of St. Stephan of Condom in 1321. "The
lepers were exterminated. There was another great snowfall ... then came a
great rain."
Local news, filed casualty between weather reports. It snowed. All the lepers
were burnt. It snowed again. Rain.
"Throughout France," the chronicler of St. Catherine de Monte Rotomagi
states, "lepers were imprisoned and condemned by the Pope; many were sent to
the stake; the survivors were confined to their dwellings. Some confessed
that they had conspired to kill all the healthy Christians ... to obtain
power over the entire world."
Due west of Marseilles, across the Golfe de Lyon, lay the provincial town of
Carcassone. From here the rumor had spread in late 1320, all the way to
Paris. Lepers, dumping poison powder into wells and rivers to transmit
leprosy to gain power, the result of "secret gatherings."
Serious business, said the man they called the "Long One," or "the Fair":
King Philippe le Bel, IV Like Constantine, a thousand years before, Philippe
would radically alter the nature of the Church.
Ambitious, a man without scruple or compunction, he had kidnapped and
murdered one Pope, Boniface VIII, and possibly another, Benedict XI. Philippe
put his own man on Christ's Vicar's throne, uprooted the Vatican, and now
held the papacy hostage in Avignon.
And his edict of June 21, 1321?
Seize them, torture them, extract confessions, burn them. Strictly segregate
by sex, and isolate without comfort those who don't confess. Children under
fourteen segregated by sex, confined for life; over fourteen—the stake. All
goods and property go to the State, plus a little to the friars and nuns who
ministered. Thus decreed King Philippe.
Carcassonne's local noblemen, prelates, and civic officials rose up in
protest in late 1320. Because it was inhumane, morally wrong, unjust?
Certainly not. Why should the Crown, they asked indignantly, "violate the
prerogatives of the local courts, taking over exclusive right to the
properties of our lepers? They had a better plan.
With the snows, bad luck had befallen Europe's lepers, as it would eventually
befall many other outcast groups—with or without snow. Before that time,
lepers had the option of entering hospital-like institutions humanely
administered by religious orders. So why were they being persecuted now?
But it wasn't just the lepers. France soon ran out of lepers. Somebody else
must be at the bottom of this: Jews. And King Philippe IV had it on good
authority, via a clever forgery from the Lord of Parthenay in Carcassonne,
who said a leper confessed that a Jew had given him poison made of "human
blood, urine, unspecified herbs and a consecrated host."
And who'd given it to the Jew? Why that nasty old reprobate Saracen King of
Granada, in those days a Moor, a gentleman of color, and Muslim to boot—and,
of course, driven by the Devil.
It's nice to know who your enemies are, and then, as today, the enemy was
poverty—King Philippe's. What with crusades and peasant insurrections, the
cost of expanding a kingdom over a three-year famine, costs were staggering.
With many of the nobility, who kept him in business, in debt to Jewish
bankers, King Philippe, the "Long One," was getting a little short.
Singling out Jews as scapegoats has a record going back to dynastic Egypt.
When some potentate needs a political or economic patsy, history provides two
who have withstood the test of time: Jews and witches.
Philippe de Valois, Count of Anjou—soon to be King Philippe V of
France—cooked up an elaborate plot and forgery. In a letter sent to Pope John
XXII at Avignon, seat of the temporarily captive Roman papacy, Valois tells
of the dramatic capture, during a solar eclipse and meteor shower, of a Jew
who had documents linking him to a Muslim plot to take over Europe.
An "intercepted" copy, bound for Philippe IV's hometown, Paris, is sure to
get the monarch's attention. It does—and everybody else's who reads it along
the way.
Today, this spurious document rests among the treasures of the Archives
Nationales. Like the nineteenth-century Russian forgery, the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, it would instigate anti-Semitism, suffering, and death.
By mid-June 1322, 150,000 livres tournois—literally a king's ransom—was
extorted from the Jews. By mid-1323, the successor of King Philippe V,
Charles IV, would expel the Jews from France.
Terminating the Templars
Philippe had been no stranger to "expulsions." Earlier, during an
insurrection in 1306, Philippe was forced to seek refuge in the Paris
headquarters of the Knights Templar. It was a distasteful experience. Some
years before, the Templar's grand master had turned down Philippe's plan to
merge their order with another. Philippe never forgot his humiliation.
Templars were military monks who had fought with distinction in the Crusades
and become Rome's—and by extension Europe's—money movers and credit
suppliers. They were without question, according to Templar historians, the
"best-trained, best-equipped, most professional military force in the Western
world."
Military security demanded maintaining scrupulous secrecy. Templars followed
this policy in conducting all business and religious affairs. Granted special
dispensation from Pope Alexander III in 1163, the Order functioned as an
autonomous institution, answering only to their grand master, and
God—insulated from the Church's corrupt practices.
But the Order itself was blamed for corruption, arrogance and ruthlessness.
In Norman Cohn's words the Templars had become a "warrior aristocracy."
In their book The Temple and the Lodge, Baigent and Leigh tell the story of
how Philippe observed "first-hand the staggering extent of the Order's wealth
and resources."
Aided by the bogus charges of a man named de Floyran, and spies who gathered
intelligence, Philippe "planned his stratagem meticulously." He wanted
Templar treasure and real estate—sans Templars.
To his bailiffs and seneschals throughout France, Philippe issued secret
orders to be opened simultaneously and implemented. By sequestering a large
contingent of loyal troops, Philippe was able to stage a predawn raid on
Friday, October 13, 1307.
Templar forces in France probably totaled less than two thousand. About three
hundred were knights. During the raid, five hundred Templars, including Grand
Master Jacques de Molay were captured. Few of the prisoners turned out to be
knights, most were sergeants, squires, stablemen, and shepherds. The rest
escaped.
And their wealth? Philippe would get some, and all the land. But the rest?
Its disappearance remains a mystery. Templar intelligence was better than
Philippe realized. A Templar fleet, with their arms, treasure, secret
documents, and most of the order, sailed away under the cover of darkness.
A few remained to submit passively to their capture, "hideous torture," and
execution. Philippe arranged for the Church to charge the Templars
specifically with blasphemous practices, which today would be labeled ritual
abuse.
Included among the accusations was the worship of a "goatheaded deity, called
'Baphomet,' a set pentacle -fashion inside a magic circle." This is the first
time the term shows up in history.
Knights who had fought as "soldiers of Christ" were now accused of heresies,
homosexuality, defiling and trampling on the cross, repudiating and "denying
Christ," infanticide, and human sacrifice-charges Philippe was by now quite
used to making.
Inquisition records indicate that even under torture, no Templar ever showed
familiarity with the term "Baphomet" or its description until it was
suggested by his Inquisitors. But Philippe's royal forgers, if not the
Templars, had created a powerful symbol. Commercially produced Baphomets can
be purchased today, over the counter, at occult shops. It is a symbol
commonly associated with satanic cults.
Into History's Mist
Days later Templar ships docked at Templar port-castles in still-Catholic
England. To the north and west, ghosting through October mists deep into the
remote firths and lochs of Robert Bruce's predominantly Celtic Scotland,
Templar craft landed heavily armed men and battle-horses.
And there, regrouping into smaller bands, they vanished.
Aided by his in-the-pocket- Pope, Philippe pursued them. Nevertheless, the
sophistication of the Templars' network, and their ability to regroup and
continue their march proved beyond "Long One's" reach.
Papal Inquisitors, under Philippe's orders, intent on tracking down known
Templar preceptories, eventually made their way to England. Did they know
about the Templars who had suddenly appeared a few months before? History
doesn't record.
Demanding Philippe's cousin King Edward turn over any knights and their
treasures, the Inquisitors waited uneasily as the English King went through
the motions of issuing warrants.
Philippe's Inquisitors' orders required cooperation. Local constabularies
weren't enthusiastically responsive. Little wonder. Imagine sending a rural
sheriff and a handful of ill-armed part-time deputies after a company of
Force Recon Marines, Navy SEALS, or British SAS. The Templars were
formidable, battle-proven, state-of-the-art warriors. They settled in and
made allies instead of enemies. They ignored the Church, as did the
Scots—reason enough to let them be.
Those Templars who were finally captured were old veterans living out their
lives in monastic retirement, some barely able to stand or walk. The rest
were never accounted for.
Today, only recently discovered, are a few time-worn traces. Eighty graves,
"rank after strictly regimented rank of badly weathered flatstones," in a
Kilmartin church graveyard on Loch Awe, Argyll, are marked only with a
"simple and austere" Templar sword. More graves were found at Kilmory, Loch
Sween, Argyll, Garaway, and Bristol, bearing only that single,
characteristically anonymous device-the Templar sword.
Inscribed swords were a Templar tradition. When old Templar warriors died,
their swords were laid on their tombstones, traced, and incised, "precisely
reflecting the shape of the original weapon."
Under their red patte cross they were renamed the Knights of Christ in Spain
and Portugal, Vasco da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator, and Christopher
Columbus (who had married the daughter of a former grand master) who would
carry Templar secrets to the New World.
And equally mysteriously, Baigent and Leigh recount, were recent graves on
one tiny island in Loch Awe. "Bodies," they reported an old couple telling
them, "were sometimes brought there for burial from considerable distances,
sometimes even flown across the Atlantic from the United States."
Historians may never agree about the existence or nonexistence of organized
witch cults and secret societies in Europe, nor the role the Inquisition may
or may not have played in creating them, but the Templars are a tantalizing
mystery because they did exist, and perhaps, as some believe, they continued
to exist.
Allegations of ritual abuse against the Templars, though quite probably
false, survived to be made against the Freemasons. Freemasonry—which has been
the subject of countless allegations of worldwide conspiracy—uses many
ancient occult symbols. Certain forms of rites and ceremonies are alleged to
have been taken from Templar ritual.
Thus Freemasonry's mystery is cloaked in Templar history.
God's Dogs
So copious is the literature of the Inquisition that a bibliography of
sources alone would be longer than this volume. As a superficial
reconnaissance, this book is not the vehicle for an exhaustive analysis of
just what the Inquisition became, its impact on occult belief, and eventually
the belief systems incorporating ritual abuse.
What had begun as a court of religious inquiry with limited powers suddenly
became, under the Dominicans—domini-(God's) canes (dogs)—very powerful. Since
noble and serf alike could stand accused, everyone had something to fear.
Sorcery and heresy ran rampant in the corrupt body of the Church from
medieval times up until the seventeenth century. From monk to cardinal,
priest to bishop, malefic magic was being worked within the cloister.
>From 900 until 1642, the bishops, cardinals, and popes who were reported to
have practiced sorcery were Albertus Magnus, Bishop of Ratisbon, who
supposedly fashioned an alchemical android that spoke; popes Sylvester II,
Benedict IX, Gregory Vill, and John XX; and Cardinal Richelieu, chief
minister to Louis XIII.
Before 1000 A.D., Church scholars had written various capitulars and
documents, such as the Canon Episcopi, that detailed magical practices, who
did them, and what could be done to eliminate their use within the Church.
Most seemed to suggest that people who recounted nocturnal gatherings to
worship old Pagan goddesses were simply succumbing to illusions. The
gatherings were imaginary. Rituals and acts of murder and cannibalism and
subsequent resurrection of the victims were "diabolical fantasies." The
punishment was penance; forty days to two years.
During the fourteenth century, according to Julio Caro Baroja, an
anthropologist and social historian born in the French Basque region, "a body
of doctrine in Canon Law was swiftly formulated whereby the witch was not a
person given to perverse fantasies and illusions, nor an adept of ancient
idolatrous cults, but quite simply the slave of the Devil."[2]
Handbooks such as Kramer and Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum, 1486, Ulrich
Molitor's De Lamiis et Phitonicis Muliebribus, 1489, and demonologies such as
Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot in 1584 and Daemonologie by
England's King James I in 1599, acted as Inquisitorial and witchhunting
guidebooks. These are blamed by Cohn and others for creating and promulgating
the concept of the Sabbat.
Scholars and historians argue about whether the belief promoted the practice,
or vice versa. Probably a little of both occurred.
Night Brawlers
During the mid-fourteenth century in the western Alps, elements of folkloric
belief emerged that had been generally ignored by nineteenth- and
twentieth-century historians of witchcraft. People calling themselves
benandanti formed groups mainly of women who centered around funerary
"processions of the dead" and groups mostly of men who focused on agrarian
"nocturnal battles" for fertility.
According to Carlo Ginzburg, these benandanti "assigned to themselves" tasks
involving "contact with the world of the dead" and "magical control of the
powers of nature to ensure the material survival of the community"—ancient
social functions very similar to those performed by Paleolithic shamans.[3]
Excursions at night, worship of a goddess, eating and drinking, animal
sacrifice, battles with unseen opponents—these Pagan cult elements are found
throughout Europe hundreds of years before the Inquisition.
During the early decades of the fifteenth century, the Inquisition blended
the ancient folkloric elements into a "cultural formation"—eventually
stereotyped as the "Witches' Sabbat"—that would last for three centuries.
These practices weren't invented by the Inquisition; they already existed and
were expropriated.
Satan, Sex, Sabbats, and Secrecy
Monotheism's greatest structural problem lies in explaining to nontheologians
how an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing God can let bad things happen.
Free will notwithstanding, some people grasp the concept better than others.
But the problem is solved by a deity who supports and facilitates negative
behavior. Enter: Satan.
All the characteristics ascribed by the pious prelates to the devil were
activities the peasants could see the Church engaging in before their very
eyes. Greed, sloth, homosexuality, pedophilia, promiscuity, and finally the
unanimous support of an aristocracy that further plundered the serfs.
Not fair, and not fun, either. And while humans can endure suppression, as a
species, humans can't endure it for long without relief. Under the stern
black-clad visage of the Church, fun wasn't a noun that saw much action.
Ergo: the Sabbat.
Did Sabbats actually occur? If so, no guest registers have survived. But ask
a B.C. Greek if there were bacchanales, or an A.D. twenties flapper if there
were drags. Ask a contemporary urban teenager if there are raves. Sure,
they'll tell you, but nobody bothers counting heads.
Europe's population during the fifteenth century exceeded several million.
With so many people, it is conceivable that, on occasion, activities took
place which closely resembled or mimicked Dionysian behavior, using or
mocking disparate elements of Pagan/Christian worship.
In the case of the Friuli region, and the benandanti, Ginzburg believes there
were ancient cultic elements quite different from those described by the
Inquisition's demonologists. It took the Dominicans over fifty years to get
the benandanti holdouts to reconform their heresies to Inquisitional
demonological standards—and begin calling their activities Sabbats.
Sabbats inevitably became an Inquisitional preoccupation. Here was proof that
personified evil was upon the land—and it wasn't old Father Jacques or Bishop
Boniface casting spells to seduce nuns or choirboys or gain unwarranted
riches or personal aggrandizement.
Belief in the Sabbat as a mass social action offered an activity against
which the Inquisition could fight spiritual and secular battles—without
destroying its own ranks. It brought to the peasant masses negative proof of
the heretofore distant Christian God's certain existence. For if the Devil
existed, so obviously, did God.
As secrecy was the Inquisition's favorite gauge of villainy; villains could
always be found. And found they were, even if they had to be created. Many
modern conspiracy theories originated during this time. No doubt their
original model was the Dominican order itself. For within its ranks existed
cabals and conspiracies as elaborate as any today.[4]
During the Inquisition, confessions were extracted under torture. Persons
punished for witchcraft and devil worship may well have been accused in order
to confiscate their property, or remove them as political or economic
threats. Europe's civil and legal systems were willing participants, and
often reportedly received the greater shares of seized property.
Segueing into the Thirty-year's War starting in 1618 between German Catholics
and Protestants, the Inquisition, which had started as a cloister industry,
developed into a multinational Christian conglomerate with branch offices in
every European capital.
Elements of the civil authority, such as judges and jailers, expanded their
staffs. Carpenters made gallows. Woodcutters and teamsters supplied fuel for
the burnings. As the Nazis would demonstrate, 325 years later,
institutionalized murder must be well -coordinated to be efficient.
Torture was elevated to a profession, and texts on the extraction of
confessions included plans on how to make machinery of pain. Those people who
managed to withstand the torture without breaking, however, received the
verdict: "Witchcraft proved by silence of the accused."
Late to the Stake
England, which supported an entirely different tradition of witchcraft from
that of the Continent, was never touched by the Inquisition. Nor did the
concept of the Sabbat show up until witchcraft laws were passed and tried
during the reign of James I, following Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603.
As on the Continent, witches in predominantly Catholic shires and counties
tended to be Protestant, and those found in Protestant shires tended to be
Catholic.
Sorcerers and witches figured importantly in the literature of Elizabethan
England. Magic was a part of culture, and Cambridge philosopher/mathematician
John Dee explored magic and alchemy. Many physicians used magical elements to
diagnose and cure. In the dramas of William Shakespeare, as well as Ben
Jonson's and Christopher Marlowe's, witches and sorcerers show up
center-stage.
Several noted witch-hunters made names for themselves; they did not have to
dig far to find witchcraft. Everybody, it seemed, knew a witch.
Elizabethan witch trials, interestingly, were based on accusations and
testimony of the witch's peers, not Inquisitors. Humble country people lived
in constant dread of evil witches and were able to identify without doubt or
hesitation those whom they believed-and who themselves professed-to be
practitioners of the black arts.
This was simple, rustic, homegrown malefic witchcraft.
There was no mention of Sabbats, transformation into animals, flying through
the air, going through keyholes, or any of the "elaborate abominations" so
anxiously sought on the Continent.
Distinctions were made, as when John Gaule in 1646 refers to the impulse to
prosecute witches:
Every poore and peevish olde Creature (such is their Ignorance and
Uncharitablenesse) cannot but fall under their suspicion, nay their infamous
exprobation; every Accident (more then ordinary) every disease whereof they
neither understand the Cause, or are acquainted with the Symptoms must bee
[sic] suspected for witch-craft. His Cow or his Hog, can not be strangely
taken but straight it must bee reckoned and rumored for bewitcht.[5]
While in the Continent, the stake was the Inquisition's death-of-choice; in
England most convicted witches were hanged. Only two Scottish witches were
burned.
Body Count
No exact figures verify how many were killed during the Inquisition. Some
estimates range in the millions and others at under eighty thousand. Since
the trials were sporadic rather than ongoing, by extrapolation the lower
figures seem more likely.
Nor were the Dominicans solely responsible for all deaths. In many cases they
conducted religious inquiry only, leaving sentencing up to civil authorities.
In The World of the Witches, Julio Caro Baroja reports that in Spain, where
the arch Inquisitor Torquemada had justly earned everlasting infamy, there
were far fewer trials, convictions, and executions than in either France or
Germany.
Protestants also took a strong hand in the European trials and burnings.
Arthur Lyons's book Satan Wants You cites a "Protestant reformer named
Carpzov, who claimed personal responsibility for the deaths of twenty
thousand people." The figures cannot be verified.
English lawyer Matthew Hopkins, son of a Puritan minister, killed "at least
two hundred" victims between 1644 and 1646 in his sweep through East Anglia.
He would have the accused dumped into a pond. Those who floated were witches.
If they
sank, "goode Christians they bee. "[6]
With the Inquisition's end, the Sabbat evaporated. Earlier in Germany, Martin
Luther's edicts ushered in the Reformation. Rome's religious suzerainty was
usurped. The last witch trial was held early in the eighteenth century. The
educated classes ushered in the Age of Reason and with it the American and
French revolutions and industrialization of the West.
Although writers like Goethe and painters like Francisco Goya might satirize
the Sabbat as a peasant superstition, or treat it seriously, the occult
social elements from which clerics had constructed the Sabbat survived, as
they always had. Through "myths, fables, rituals and ecstasies," remaining at
the "hidden centers of our culture," they are still active.[7]
By the nineteenth century, urban populations and industrialization,
education, and communication were fast changing the cultural face of the
Continent. Witchcraft, Sabbats, and the elements of Pagan culture that had
kept them alive were consigned to the remote peasant communities of eastern
Europe and the Mediterranean.
"Thus, on the one hand," Baroja would note of the midnineteenth century, "we
have a romantic historian [Michelet, 1867] who considers the witch to be a
real person, a product of despair: the priestess of a cult formed by outcasts
and unprotected members of society; and on the other hand, we have a
theologian, [Ignaz DoIlinger, c.1860] in disagreement with his superiors, who
looks upon the witch as a monstrous product of the imagination dreamed up by
small-minded lawyers and theologians in the service of a temporal authority."
pps. 145-163
--[notes]--
Chapter 14
1. M. Malachi, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church (New York: Bantam,
1981), 90.
2. Julio Baroja, The World of the Witches trans. O.N.V. Glendinning
(University of Chicago Press, 1965), 29.
3. C. Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (London:
Hutchinson Radius, 1990), 11.
4. Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
5. G. L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1956).
6. ibid.
7. Julio Baroja, The World of the Witches trans. 0. N. V. Glendinning
(University of Chicago Press, 1965).
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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