Why were witches burned at the stake? let’s say they actually did worship the devil, as opposed to being a product of mass hysteria, why were they killed instead of being converted? The same question applies to the “heathens” during the dark ages.
Did the church think that the religion of witches would spread? That the witches couldn’t be converted (wouldn’t this go against the bible-God giving mankind freewill), Or did the church not consider witches human-they were devils (or some such thing)?
Meatros, well first of all you are writing like Witches actually existed as a coven or something and were burned for practicing their religion. When in actuality the wicthes burned or hung or drown were simply not obeying the Puritanical beliefs of the times. At least in the case of the Salem Witch Trials and subsequent deaths. Puritans should ahve been burned for the murdur of those poor women in Salem Mass, not the ladies who were single or flirtacious…
What witches are you talking about?
The salem ‘witches’ I assure you were not Wiccan or anything liek that…
I know they weren’t wiccan; I also know that witches don’t exist. That being said, as I understood it, people back then believed in witches.
Also I suppose this question doesn’t have to pertain to only witches. During the inquisition people were put to death for being in league with the devil (or at least that is my understanding). Was there any reason as to why the church didn’t think they could become good christians? I’m assuming the church had the power during the inquisition.
I saw an interesting but chilling documentary recently about Witchfinders in England in the 16th and 17th centuries; essentially the country was gripped by religious fervour; the nature of things like disease were not well understood; if someone (or sometimes if an animal) fell ill, it was thought to be the work of sorcerers; unfortunately anyone who stood out as unusual (deformities, eccentricity) was a prime target for suspicion.
Confessions of witchcraft were often obtained under various forms of torture, physical and psychological; sleep deprivation would be applied, then the resulting incoherent unbalanced behaviour pointed to as evidence of consort with demons.
As you can imagine, with widespread fear of horrible execution, there also came the temptation to point the finger in order to make oneself look blameless, causing a sort of snowball effect.
Witches weren’t burned at Salem (nor, as far as I’m aware, anywhere in North America), but they were burned in Europe. I don’t know why burning was done, although it certainly wasn;t the exclusive punishment. See the Malleus Maleficarum, or Marvin harris’ book Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches and references therein.
As for redemption – in Salem witches were offsered clemency if they admitted to witchcraft, named the others in their group, and asked forgiveness. The horror, of course, is that many accused in the Salem business were perfectly innocent, didn’t want to confess to crimes they hadn;t committed, and had no one else to blame. They got hanged (or, in the case of Giles Corey, pressed to death). The reliance of the Salem judges on “spectral evidence” and the naming of others as guilty (not unlike the McCarthy hearings, a point that drove Arthur Miller to write The Crucible) drove the trials forward, sucking up new victims. Even the Salem courts realized the error of its way in time, and issued an apology – too late to save those hanged. The Salem Witchcraft business is a very complex one, with a broad literature and a lot of competing theories. One interesting point – highlighted in at least two respectable histories – is that witchcraft (of a sort, at least) was practiced at Salem.
I think it helps to understand the world view woven into the theology of the time. Order–all order, all semblance of things making sense and being as they should be–was from God, and aside from that would be chaos. Now, regardless of whether you think that the following means that they had a very small notion of God or you attribute it to the old “God gave Man free will” stuff, this God-given Orderliness of things was considered a delicate state. The idea of letting people entertain their own notions and of spreading their heresies around was regarded as being about as sensible as letting a roomful of unsupervised toddlers bearing drippy ice cream and boxes of crayons into the Rare Manuscripts portion of the library.
If we (the humans) listened to unGodly voices and began believing Wrong Things, the very fabric of our social existence could unravel, and there would be no putting it back again, any more than the toddlers would be able to undo their destructiveness and restore the manuscripts. Only God could create order, and if we fucked it up there was no reason to assume God would make matters right rather than let us wallow in the intolerable chaos that we would bring upon ourselves through our disobedience.
Such is orthodoxy. You find variations on this attitude in pretty much any rigid orthodoctrinal system.
You left out the possibilities of revenge killings and political maneuvering between the catholic and protestant churches. There’s darn little evidence that witches actually existed. Robin Briggs’ Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft details the persecution of “witches” in parts of europe. Although Briggs has been criticized for focusing too narrowly on the sociological context, he’s produced the best available source on the events that actually occured. Not being either a witch, or having a religious axe to grind, I find his arguments more plausible than the existence of a widespread cult of devil worshippers.
CalMeacham’s points about Salem can be extended more generally. The basic deal was that if you confessed and repented, you got off. Everyone would have agreed that this was the preferred outcome. This was true across Europe. There wasn’t difference between Catholic and Protestant thinking on this point.
As for the punishment used for those who refused, that varied according to the particular jurisdiction. In some countries it was indeed burning at the stake, but under English law (which was applied to the English colonies in America) it was usually hanging. The point to remember is that most crimes carried the death penalty. There was nothing that special about the fact that witches were executed. It is also worth noting that it was often the secular authorities, not ‘the Church’, who dealt with witchcraft cases.
There are any number of theories proposed by historians as to why people were accused of witchcraft. Just about the only thing most of them do agree on, however, is that there were few, if any, actual witches and that the trials had nothing to do with survivals from pre-Christian paganism.
Well, your coming at it as if these “witches” were possessed by the devil, unwillingly–when what the accusers were saying is that they voluntarily spat in the face of god and joined up with Satan in an attempt to overthrow all good things in the world.
In other words, they were accused of not possession, or of straying into some minor sin, but rather of actively and vigorously defying god and supporting his enemy. That’s some serious heresy.
Gripes, let me try to remember…Ok, first I thanked you all for the information.
Second I said something along the lines of: Would it be accurate to say that if an accused person (from the salem witch trials or the inquisition) would be let go if they admitted/repented/gave up other people? Would it also be accurate to say that the Catholic church (or whatever christian church was there at the time) wasn’t in charge of these trials-they may have laid down the “moral” (and I use that term very loosely in this circumstance) foundations for the trial?
Also who was in charge of the persecutions? (the government?)
All those convicted of witchcraft at Salem were hanged, not burned. One person who refused to plead either guilty or not guilty was pressed to death by stones. Hasn’t Cecil addressed this matter once?
The period during which witchcraft was vigorously prosecuted was not the Middle Ages. It was definitely not “the dark ages,” which is generally taken as meaning about 500 to 1000 A.D. The period of the witchcraft trials was about 1400 to 1700 A.D. In other words, witchcraft mania reached its height during the Renaissance.
I don’t think that witches were so much seen as followers of a “false religion” as they were people who were in league with the forces of evil in order to use supernatural forces to harm other people. In the course of their interrogations, they would inevitably be coerced into confessing that they had made their neighbors’ cows give sour milk, caused pregnant women to miscarry, and so on. They were thus seen not simply as heretics or infidels but as dangerous criminals, along the lines of arsonists, poisoners, or saboteurs.
Belief in witchcraft (and witchcraft trials, or lynch mobs) have been found in a number societies outside Christian Europe–you read about such things happening even today. The common denominator isn’t “wrong belief”, it’s “people who use dangerous powers to harm others”.
You still hear about this kind of thing today in Africa. Alot of the less-educated people believe in something akin to voodoo, and people who are thought to be putting curses on others can be in for alot of trouble.
This is kind of nit-picky, and I might be wrong, but I thought the Puritans didn’t believe in free will. I thought they were more of the Calvinist, pre-determination sort.
Well, yeah, the Puritans did believe in predestination, with themselves as the elect. However, they said, because human beings don’t possess divine knowledge, we act as if we had free will, so long as we recognize that the gift of grace guides our actions.
Life was tough back then. You were could be hanged for simple theft. The idea of saving rather than punishing criminals is on the whole a fairly modern (19th C) concept. You play with the devil, you pay the price.
With respect to the method of execution, which was primarily burning, at least in continental Europe, fire was chosen because of the Biblical proscription against the “shedding of blood”. I don’t have the specific cite for this, though I read it very recently, either in Barbara Tuchman’s excellent history of the 14th century “A Distant Mirror” or Jacques Le Goff’s “Medieval Civilization 400 - 1500”.
And as Squink pointed out, accusations of witchcraft were as often as not motivated by simple revenge, or greed (confiscation of the accused’s property was a commonplace), or political expediency. While it is true that witch hysteria popped up frequently across Europe, opportunists were quick to seize on the hysteria to further their own selfish desires and destroy their enemies via accusations of witchcraft.
Curiously, it was in fact the Spanish Inquisition which offered accused witches/heretics the chance for life via recanting and repentance. The accused was often allowed to return to their normal life upon completion of penance. Whereas in much of the rest of Europe, a confession, and even acts of contrition, were just a precursor to an eventual execution.
I was told that fire was used because it was thought to purify the soul. Hence the burning of heretics under the Tudor monarchs in the sixteenth century, esp. Mary Tudor.
I was told that fire was used because it was thought to purify the soul. Hence the burning of heretics under the Tudor monarchs in the sixteenth century, esp. Mary Tudor.