nick0515 said:
Do you know any good online references for this subject Plotinus. I find your comments a little surpirsing. Especially that the official position of the church was that witches didn't exist.
I don't know about online references; I'm afraid that witch hunts are one of those subjects where you will find a vast amount of disinformation online (mainly, I'm afraid, from neo-pagans who think that the victims of the witch hunts were pagans, a notion for which there is no evidence). Offline, Allison Coudert has written about this, but probably the major historian of this matter and also a very readable one is Ronald Hutton. I suppose these sources might be a bit hard to find where you are, but if you can find anything online traceable to Hutton you should be on the right track.
nick0515 said:
I have always been lead to believe that the church considered witches to women inleague with the devil.
Actually, until the Renaissance, "witches" were just people with magical powers who used those powers to harm others. They were a sort of popular bogeyman. The church didn't take them seriously because the church - for the most part - didn't take claims of magical powers, whether benevolent or malevolent, seriously. This began to change in the fifteenth century, above all with the
Malleus maleficarum, written by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, which offered a new understanding of witches as people who had made a pact with the devil. This gradually became the official understanding of witches, and great efforts were made to change the popular image of witches to this new one. These proved very successful. Remember that although it was the Catholic Church which pushed for this reinterpretation of witches, most of the notorious witch hunts were conducted by Protestants, not by Catholics.
Also, although most of the victims of the witch hunts (some 90%, I believe) were women, this was not exclusively the case - and in some areas, especially Russia, male victims outnumbered female ones.
The older understanding of witches as malevolent sorcerers has persisted, of course. In fact in places where "witches" are persecuted today (such as in certain parts of Africa, where the numbers of people killed for witchcraft are rising at the moment) it's just the old, old story of people being scared that certain other people are putting curses on them, and reacting in the only way they know how. That's something that long predates Christianity.
nick0515 said:
Elenar, don't be two quick to judge Plotinus wrong. He has a PhD in Theology so may well know a great deal more about it than the people who contributed to the wikipedia article
Actually my PhD is in philosophy (my master's in in theology). But the point here is really that Wikipedia is of variable reliability at best, and I'm afraid that when it comes to religion, it is at its least reliable. I would never place any weight on what Wikipedia says on this sort of subject.
elenar said:
To me, simple fact that church harrased people in the name of fight with 'heresy', that allows lots of excuses to abuse it and use as tool of control, is enough to consider sam ehappened with so called 'witches' even though the name could not be so popular yet.
I sympathise with your point of view, but it's very sloppy to say "they did bad things to one set of people, so we might as well say that they did bad things to other people too". As I mentioned above, it wasn't even Catholics who typically persecuted witches, it was Protestants, so it wasn't the same people doing it at all.
Ozymandias said:
My bad: I was off on dating the German witch hunts to the Middle Ages (which is mildly ironic, as my undergradtuate minor was the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe.)
From The Rejection of Pascal's Wager
"Perhaps one of the worst atrocities ever committed by any religion is the witch hunt that plagued Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. The death toll estimates varied from between one hundred thousand to two million people".
Not the best scholarly source perhaps, but interesting nonetheless.
That site is not as bad as some others with the same intent I've seen, but it's still obviously doing quite a lot of distortion of the evidence and selective citation. This is a case in point: no-one knows how many people died, but the figure given there is
way off current scholarly estimates, which normally hover around the 35,000 mark. A lot, of course, but hardly 2,000,000. (Hutton, incidentally, thinks it was closer to 70,000, which is very high by normal scholarly standards, but not absurdly so - as I say, he is a very respectable scholar of this sort of thing).
Also, as I said, the witch hunts of early modern times were smaller in scope than those of antiquity. I suppose it doesn't fit the prejudices of the author of that site to admit that Christians killed fewer witches than pagans did, though.
Sorry. Kierkegaard and Berdyaev seemed to be overlooked in Yisraels question... Next time I will search the thread for answers.
) would be counted as war crimes today, and IIRC burning of witches was especially popular in Germany ... ?
