on June 7th, 2009 by solitudeone
Male Witch Lost
Summations of History
The significance of male witches throughout history cannot be ignored. The numbers who were accused, tried, tortured and executed has been glossed over and de-classified by those of political, ideological, religious and personal agendas, including but not limited to feminist scholars. This very simplistic portrayal between gender and witchcraft does not truthfully reflect the historiography of the male witch, for he was no less an important nor interesting practioner than his female counterparts, and should not be treated as if he were.
In examining trial records from the three century long activities of the ‘witch hunt’ periods, (15th.-17th.c), we do find notable variations between the gender of those accused. Although these variations went to extremes in some countries, the overall records show that country witchcraft seems to have had no obvious link with gender at all. Of the cases which went to the parlement of Paris on appeals, just over half were men. Of all Europeans executed for witchcraft, 20-25% were male. Of the more extreme notations:
Iceland: 90% male
Estonia: 60% male
Finland: 50% male
to the other extreme of 90% and sometimes more,
Hungary, Denmark and England focused predominately on women.
It is clear that the Witch-Hunts in Europe and America were by no means focused only on women. Original records, numerous studies and verifiable gender analysies of male witch historography also show that the actual conviction rates for witchcraft were much the same for both sexes, although actual execution records do show only 1 in 4 to be male, not all accusations and convictions led to execution. Other punishments inflicted on convicted witches included mutilation (various body parts being cut off), branding, whipping, dunking, locking in the the stocks, jailing, fining, banishing, or selling into slavery.
Why the over-sight and often times denial of the male witch existance?
“It is most common in mortal nature to fear that which they cannot understand or control. It is also most common for the same mortals to place blame for numerous maladies and circumstances upon something or someone else, rather than self.”~Solitudeone
Here in we must take into consideration some of the elements from the following:
historical time period
cultural beliefs
organized religious movements
economical and social circumstances
the continuing change of the powers between political and church leaders.
The power of central governments; the independence of local authorities; tensions created by war, failing economies or famine; and uncertainties about religious conformity and church dictates all factored into the now infamous ‘witch hunts.’
Witches went through a putative shift from gender-neutral, to one more closely related to women. Quite possibly, this shift could be the foundation of the gendering of witchcraft. Although the preferred target of the church was women, they also clearly stated their beliefs in the existance of male witches, which should also be punishable. From the viewpoint of the church, along with cultural and social beliefs of the times, women were considered inferiour and of lesser intelligence than men, and therefore more likely to succumb to the ‘ways of the devil.’
Many early writers leaned towards the femininzation of the male witch, and early demonology texts also made note that the male witch shared some of the same attributes as his female counterpart. There is enough consistancy between the various and numerous texts on male witches though, that a level of stability in male witch existance is clearly evident. As to why the denial of male witches grew to what it is now, we can also add in the newer beliefs and practices of the more ‘goddess-centric’ traditions.
Denials of the historiographies of the male witch are ones which attempt to re-write both history and truth to better suit the views and beliefs of some. This also has an aire about it of bordering upon possible ‘gendercide,’ of the male witch. But this denial and the many half-truth writings of today cannot obliterate the past, present or future existance of the male witch. Unfortunately, this sort of denial is not uncommon. Governments have been known to candy-coat their own history to better their appearance and acceptance, the church has made its’ own attempts to hide and/or diminish much of its’ widespread persecutions and mass slaughters in the name of their ‘loving-god’, going so far as to raise to saint hood status some of those which/witch they helped to execute.
Taking into consideration all things, I am going to forego the usual provisions of live links to various sources for this post. It is my inner spirit sense which tells me that there are many who will continue to deny the existance of a male witch no matter how much truth and history are provided. For the few who wish to actually research the historiographies of the male witch, I will provide a small list of starting points and readings for you to begin your journey. With a bit of meaningful search intent, there is available substantial, informative and truthful documentation in abundance both on the web, in literary publications and historical texts.
“Male Witches in Early-Modern Europe”, Manchester University Press-Lara Apps and Andrew Gow.
“Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft” by Walter Scott [1830].
Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England, 1593–1680 Oxford Universitey Press-E.J. Kent (*a different point of view)
“Man As Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe (Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic) Ralph Schulte.
Innocent VIII: BULL Summis desiderantes, Dec. 5th, 1484.
(“It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany, as well as in the provinces, cities, territories, regions, and dioceses of Mainz, Ko1n, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth; that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals, and hinder men from begetting and women from conceiving, and prevent all consummation of marriage; that, moreover, they deny with sacrilegious lips the faith they . received in holy baptism; and that, at the instigation of the enemy of mankind, they do not fear to commit and perpetrate many other abominable offences and crimes, at the risk of their own souls, to the insult of the divine majesty and to the pernicious example and scandal of multitudes.”).
Johannes Nider, the ANT HILL, circa 1437.
Nider, Formicarius, ed. of Augsburg, ca. 1476Lib. V. cap. 3.
This is one of the earliest books which thows light on the methods of persecution. Written by the Dominican scholar Johannes Nider, about 1436, the work consists of a dialogue between a theologian and a doubter on a variety of topics, including the confession of a male witch.
“I will relate to you some examples, which I have gained in part from the teachers of our faculty, in part from the experience of a certain upright secular judge, worthy of all faith, who from the torture and confession of witches and from his experiences in public and private has learned many things of this sort-a man with whom I have often discussed this subject broadly and deeply-to wit, Peter, a citizen of Bern, in the diocese of Lausanne, [Note: this is Peter of Gruyeres, Bernese castellan 1392-1406] who has burned many witches of both sexes, and has driven others out of the territory of the Bernese. I have moreover conferred with one Benedict, a monk of the Benedictine order, who, although now a very devout cleric in a reformed monastery at Vienna, was a decade ago, while still in the world, a necromancer, juggler, buffoon, and strolling player, well-known as an expert among the secular nobility. I have likewise heard certain of the following things from the Inquisitor of Heretical Pravity [note: this was the official title of the represenative of the Inquistion] at Autun, who was a devoted reformer of our order in the convent at Lyons, and has convicted many of witchcraft in the diocese of Autun.”
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I’ve read over your post and have come to the following conclusions:
I do not argue with your numbers and percentages, as I have no facts or figures to support or discredit them.(yet!)
But I do argue the validity of men being Witches.
Thank you for your research and historical facts. This was an eye opening and informative read. Regardless of whether it is appropriate for a man to refer to himself as a witch, I am grateful Crowley, Gardner, Llewellyen, Buckland among others have paved the way for us all.
I’ve long studied the history of witchcraft. While nobody would want to deny that males were persecuted as witches, as with women, often the cases need a closer look. Some of the recent fashion for ‘male witch’ books does this, thinking perhaps to answer feminism’s apparent hijacking of witchcraft. Some authors do this well, some are as biased as the feminists they criticise.
More often, the subject matter becomes overlaid, as in the case of Joan of Arc, the charge was actually heresy. Or, when we think of female ‘witches’ being burned, the crime was more often petty treason. Male witches, especially in the Icelandic states, were often executed for other crimes, whilst also being known as witches. Coining, treason, recusancy,cannibalism, sexual offences. This is not to excuse that they were horribly murdered, of course,and what they had in common with women was that their deaths stood as a warning. John Fian for instance in Scotland, was burned for incestuous rape of his sister, and claimed the devil made him do it, not that he was a witch. His sister was also burned. Not because she was willing, but because as a woman, she was the devil’s agent (aka:a witch)and tempted him to carnality. This brings us to another matter, that when men were executed for witchcraft,they were very often tortured in ways that ‘unmanned’ them. Anna Pappenheimer, a woman accused in Germany at the height of the persecutions, had a husband and sons. The very public torture of her male relatives makes it obvious that they were rendered surrogate women before their deaths. And yes, she was unwomanned, before she was killed too, but most reports of the day dwell on the men who died. So while many men did die, and no one is refuting that, many were also reduced to a state of quasi womanhood via torture. It also doesn’t change the fact that more women than men died, purely because, like John Fian’s sister, they were seen as agents of the devil, tempting men to commit carnal acts, robbery and murder.
The one area where men seemed to have suffered as much from accusations of witchcraft is through disability, particularly that caused by old age. There is no doubt that in some places (Germany again) where the poor(read aged and infirm)had begging and gleaning rights, the numbers of these had increased after a series of internal wars and famines. The policy was one of social control and so many of the interant poor were simply exterminated. Of course, the authorities couldn’t just kill people (the church wouldn’t like it apparently!), hence the rumour of satan stalking the countryside, doing evil via cathars, albigenses, jews and eventually witches. Disabled people were seen as satan’s particular favourites. It was common for epileptics to be whipped to drive the devil out, for example. So, those in power gave the people something to ‘entertain’ them and saved a lot of money in the process.
As for the accusation that women did give evidence against one another – that is common across history, even without the death sentence, but interestingly men give evidence against more men – whether they are accomplices in the supposed crime or merely part of the legal process. On the basis of that evidence, we might conclude men are committing their own gendercide.As vastly more numbers of cats, dogs, toads etc, died – these more often burned than not in religious festivities, (as the devils agents again)This, during the plague, backfired badly! So,perhaps there should be a book on cat and dogicide too?
This is all about world domination and ignorance… One religion, one governement, one army. They would kill everyone, men or women that do not follow their plan. Still happen today!
“He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.” ~William Shakespeare -Julius Caesar- Act 1. Scene II
may all who have perished or received in justice and supression of natural essence and love,no matter what sex or being they are be healed now on all levels,in all directions of space and time,all dimensions,alternate realities and parrellel universes.may forgiveness and compassion be present and fill their hearts with unconditional love infinitely.Thank you for this gift of love now.
May all that perpetrated this injustice,no matter what their motivations be released now and forgiven in compassion and love,knowing that what is past is past and over and all that is is Love.In Jesus name i pray for this now Amen
Lord Aerendil,
I applaud you on your endeavors, your self-confidence in your position as a male in the pagan community, and your research. I find it a mystery as to why some men want so badly to be known by a uniquely feminine term.
A very dear friend of mine (a male and a pagan) and I were discussing this phenomenon, and he said:
“If all men were removed from the realm of Witchcraft, it would not change anything in the least. But if women were removed from The Craft, the whole essence of it would be gone.”
F.Y.I.
By analogy, gendercide would be the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms, such as “gynocide” and “femicide,” have been used to refer to the wrongful killing of girls and women. But “gendercide” is a sex-neutral term, in that the victims may be either male or female.
There is a need for such a sex-neutral term, since sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that these are in important respects analogous to the lethal consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudices.
No one is out to inhialate and obliterate the male gender Solitudeone, if you feel that way, you are truly insecure in your own skin, and as far as male witches, that would be an impossibility, since before the advent of Modern Wicca and Neo-Paganism the term Witch simply did not apply to the masculine gender and is but a misnomer and self-gratification on the part of one Gerald Gardner and followers of the same line of thought!
And you and others like Fate can argue this point at infinitum and defend your hopeless position, but, those of us who know the truth and do their homework know better. We are not accusing male worshipers of Wicca of being any less devout to their beliefs than women, nor are we saying that they are in any way less favored, only that the name Witch is a female gendered noun and that men are mistaken when they call themselves as such.
And if Fate feels it is not such a big deal who calls who what, then why do you and she feel that you need to defend your positions so vehemently. I only defend the term Witch to be feminine because I feel it is a male usurpation of a revered dedicated name given to women in the Craft who are worthy of the term. So as far as I’m concerned I could care less if you call yourself a donkey, but do not usurp and partriarchyize the name that belongs strictly to Women in the Craft!
That is all I will say on this subject!
Lord Aerendil )O(
Wiccan/Druid (but not a Witch).
Now we come to the true Gendercide!
The European Witch-Hunts, c. 1450-1750
Summary
For three centuries of early modern European history, diverse societies were consumed by a panic over alleged witches in their midst. Witch-hunts, especially in Central Europe, resulted in the trial, torture, and execution of tens of thousands of victims, about three-quarters of whom were women. Arguably, neither before nor since have adult European women been selectively targeted for such largescale atrocities.
The background
The witch-hunts of early modern Europe took place against a backdrop of rapid social, economic, and religious transformation. As we will see in the modern-day case-studies below, such generalized stress — including the prevalence of epidemics and natural disasters — is nearly always central to outbreaks of mass hysteria of this type. Jenny Gibbons’ analysis ties the witch-hunts to other “panics” in early modern Europe:
Traditional [tolerant] attitudes towards witchcraft began to change in the 14th century, at the very end of the Middle Ages. … Early 14th century central Europe was seized by a series of rumor-panics. Some malign conspiracy (Jews and lepers, Moslems, or Jews and witches) was attempting to destroy the Christian kingdoms through magick and poison. After the terrible devastation caused by the Black Death [bubonic plague] (1347-1349), these rumors increased in intensity and focused primarily on witches and “plague-spreaders.” Witchcraft cases increased slowly but steadily from the 14th-15th century. The first mass trials appeared in the 15th century. At the beginning of the 16th century, as the first shock-waves from the Reformation hit, the number of witch trials actually dropped. Then, around 1550, the persecution skyrocketed. What we think of as “the Burning Times” — the crazes, panics, and mass hysteria — largely occurred in one century, from 1550-1650. In the 17th century, the Great Hunt passed nearly as suddenly as it had arisen. Trials dropped sharply after 1650 and disappeared completely by the end of the 18th century. (Gibbons, “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt”.)
Gibbons’ allusion to the Reformation reminds us that the clash between institutional Catholicism and emergent Protestantism contributed to the collapse of a stable world-view, which eventually led to panic and hyper-suspiciousness on the part of Catholic and Protestant authorities alike. Writes Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “This helps us understand why only the most rapidly developing countries, where the Catholic church was weakest, experienced a virulent witch craze (i.e., Germany, France, Switzerland). Where the Catholic church was strong (Spain, Italy, Portugal) hardly any witch craze occurred … the Reformation was definitely the first time that the church had to cope with a large-scale threat to its very existence and legitimacy.” But Ben-Yehuda adds that “Protestants persecuted witches with almost the same zeal as the Catholics … Protestants and Catholics alike felt threatened.” It is notable that the witch-hunts lost most of their momentum with the end of the Thirty Years War (Peace of Westphalia, 1648), which “gave official recognition and legitimacy to religious pluralism.” (Ben-Yehuda, “The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologist’s Perspective,” American Journal of Sociology, 86: 1 [July 1980], pp. 15, 23.)
The gendercide
The witch-hunts waxed and waned for nearly three centuries, with great variations in time and space. “The rate of witch hunting varied dramatically throughout Europe, ranging from a high of 26,000 deaths in Germany to a low of 4 in Ireland.” (Gibbons, Recent Developments.)
Despite the involvement of church authorities, “The vast majority of witches were condemned by secular courts,” with local courts especially noted for their persecutory zeal (Gibbons, Recent Developments). The standard procedure in most countries was for accused witches to be brought before investigating tribunals and interrogated. In some parts of Europe (e.g., England), torture was rarely used; but where the witch-hunts were most intensive, it was a standard feature of the interrogations. Obviously, a large majority of accused who “confessed” to witchcraft did so as a result of the brutal tortures to which they were exposed. About half of all convicted witches were given sentences short of execution. The unluckier half were generally killed in public, often en masse, by hanging or burning.
Being female hardly guaranteed that one would be suspected or accused of witchcraft. As Steven Katz notes, “statistical evidence … makes clear that over 99.9-plus percent of all women who lived during the three centuries of the witch craze were not harmed directly by the police arm of either the state or the church, though both had the power to do so had the elites that controlled them so desired.” (Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, p. 503.) Nor were all accused witches female. Nonetheless, the witch-hunts can be viewed as a case of “genderized mass murder,” according to Katz (p. 503). He adds: “the overall evidence makes plain that the growth — the panic — in the witch craze was inseparable from the stigmatization of women. … Historically, the most salient manifestation of the unreserved belief in female power and female evil is evidenced in the tight, recurrent, by-now nearly instinctive association of women and witchcraft. Though there were male witches, when the witch craze accelerated and became a mass phenomenon after 1500 its main targets, its main victims, were female witches. Indeed, one strongly suspects that the development of witch-hunting into a mass hysteria only became possible when directed primarily at women.” (The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, p. 433 [n. 1], 436.) Katz draws out the depths of this misogyny through a comparison with anti-semitism:
The medieval conception of women shares much with the corresponding medieval conception of Jews. In both cases, a perennial attribution of secret, bountiful, malicious “power,” is made. Women are anathematized and cast as witches because of the enduring grotesque fears they generate in respect of their putative abilities to control men and thereby coerce, for their own ends, male-dominated Christian society. Whatever the social and psychological determinants operative in this abiding obsession, there can be no denying the consequential reality of such anxiety in medieval Christendom. Linked to theological traditions of Eve and Lilith, women are perceived as embodiments of inexhaustible negativity. Though not quite quasi-literal incarnations of the Devil as were Jews, women are, rather, their ontological “first cousins” who, like the Jews, emerge from the “left” or sinister side of being. (Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, p. 435.)
The classic evocation of this deranged misogyny is the Malleus maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), published by Catholic inquisition authorities in 1485-86. “All wickedness,” write the authors, “is but little to the wickedness of a woman. … What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours. … Women are by nature instruments of Satan — they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation.” (Quoted in Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, pp. 438-39.) “The importance of the Malleus cannot be overstated,” argues Ben-Yehuda:
It was to become the most influential and widely used handbook on witchcraft. … Its enormous influence was practically guaranteed, owing not only to its authoritative appearance but also to its extremely wide distribution. It was one of the first books to be printed on the recently invented printing press and appeared in no fewer than 20 editions. … The moral backing had been provided for a horrible, endless march of suffering, torture, and human disgrace inflicted on thousands of women. (Ben-Yehuda, “The European Witch Craze,” p. 11.)
Many scholars have argued that it was the women who seemed most independent from patriarchal norms — especially elderly ones living outside the parameters of the patriarchal family — who were most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. “The limited data we have regarding the age of witches … shows a solid majority of witches were older than 50, which in the early modern period was considered to be a much more advanced age than today.” (Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, p. 129.) “The reason for this strong correlation seems clear,” writes Katz: “these women, particularly older women who had never given birth and now were beyond giving birth, comprised the female group most difficult to assimilate, to comprehend, within the regulative late medieval social matrix, organized, as it was, around the family unit.” (The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I, pp. 468-69.) As more women than men tended to survive into a dependent old age, they could also be seen disproportionately as a burden by neighbors: “The woman who was labeled a witch wanted things for herself or her household from her neighbors, but she had little to offer in return to those who were not much better off than she. Increasingly resented as an economic burden, she was also perceived by her neighbors to be the locus of a dangerous envy and verbal violence.” (Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England, p. 65.)
One theory, popularized by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in their 1973 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, proposed that midwives were especially likely to be targeted in the witch-hunts. This assertion has been decisively refuted by subsequent research, which has established the opposite: that “being a licensed midwife actually decreased a woman’s chances of being charged” and “midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters” than being victimized by them. (Gibbons, Recent Developments; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History.)
Overall, approximately 75 to 80 percent of those accused and convicted of witchcraft in early modern Europe were female. Accordingly, Christina Larner’s “identification of the relationship of witch-hunting to woman-hunting” seems well-grounded, as does her conclusion that the witch-hunts were “sex-related” if not “sex-specific.” “This does not mean that simple overt sex war is treated as a satisfactory explanation for witch-hunting, or that the … men who were accused are not to be taken into account.” Rather, “it means that the fact that the accused were overwhelmingly female should form a major part of any analysis.” (Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland, p. 3.)
Male “witches”
Robin Briggs calculates that 20 to 25 percent of Europeans executed for witchcraft between the 14th and 17th centuries were male. Regional variations are again notable. France was “a fascinating exception to the wider pattern, for over much of the country witchcraft seems to have had no obvious link with gender at all. Of nearly 1,300 witches whose cases went to the parlement of Paris on appeal, just over half were men. … The great majority of the men accused were poor peasants and artisans, a fairly representative sample of the ordinary population.” Briggs adds:
There are some extreme cases in peripheral regions of Europe, with men accounting for 90 percent of the accused in Iceland, 60 percent in Estonia and nearly 50 per cent in Finland. On the other hand, there are regions where 90 per cent or more of known witches were women; these include Hungary, Denmark and England. The fact that many recent writers on the subject have relied on English and north American evidence has probably encouraged an error of perspective here, with the overwhelming predominance of female suspects in these areas (also characterized by low rates of persecution) being assumed to be typical. Nor is it the case that the courts treated male suspects more favourably; the conviction rates are usually much the same for both sexes. (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, pp. 260-61.) However, it was never proven nor investigated that the men accused were actually Witches. Most were merely poor farmers and followers of protestant teachings. As were many of the women accused.
How many died?
“The most dramatic [recent] changes in our vision of the Great Hunt [have] centered on the death toll,” notes Jenny Gibbons. She points out that estimates made prior to the mid-1970s, when detailed research into trial records began, “were almost 100% pure speculation.” (Gibbons, Recent Developments.) “On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements,” writes Robin Briggs, “a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than genocide. [See, e.g., the witch-hunt documentary "The Burning Times".] This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 per cent were men.” Briggs adds that “these figures are chilling enough, but they have to be set in the context of what was probably the harshest period of capital punishments in European history.” (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, p. 8.)
Brian Levack’s book The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe arrives at roughly similar conclusions. Levack “surveyed regional studies and found that there were approximately 110,000 witch trials. Levack focused on recorded trials, not executions, because in many cases we have evidence that a trial occurred but no indication of its outcomes. On average, 48% of trials ended in an execution, [and] therefore he estimated 60,000 witches died. This is slightly higher than 48% to reflect the fact that Germany, the center of the persecution, killed more than 48% of its witches.” (Gibbons, Recent Developments.)
Nonetheless, in the view of Gendercide Watch, even such a reduced and diffused death-toll should be considered “gendercidal,” in that it inflicted mass gender-selective killing on European women. Such killing does not need to be totalizing, either in its ambitions or its impact, to meet the definitions of gendercide and genocide that we use. Indeed, it is arguable that at no other time in European history have adult women been targeted selectively, on such a scale, for torture and annihilation.
Who was responsible?
The medieval witch-hunts have long been depicted as part of a “war against women” conducted exclusively or overwhelmingly by men, especially those in positions of central authority. Deborah Willis notes that “more polemical” feminist accounts “are likely to portray the witch as a heroic protofeminist resisting patriarchal oppression and a wholly innocent victim of a male-authored reign of terror designed to keep women in their place.” (Willis, Malevolent Nurture, p. 12.)
In fact, the stigmatizing, victimizing, and murdering of accused “witches” is more accurately seen as a collaborative enterprise between men and women at the local level. “The historical record suggests that both men and women found it easiest to fix these fantasies [of witchcraft], and turn them into horrible reality, when they were attached to women. It is really crucial to understand that misogyny in this sense was not reserved to men alone, but could be just as intense among women.” Most of the accusations originated in “conflicts [that] normally opposed one woman to another, with men liable to become involved only at a later stage as ancillaries to the original dispute.” Briggs adds that “most informal accusations were made by women against other women, … [and only] leaked slowly across to the men who controlled the political structures of local society.” At the trial level, his research on the French province of Lorraine found that
women did testify in large numbers against other women, making up 43 per cent of witnesses in these cases on average, and predominating in 30 per cent of them. … A more sophisticated count for the English Home Circuit by Clive Holmes shows that the proportion of women witnesses rose from around 38 per cent in the last years of Queen Elizabeth to 53 per cent after the Restoration. … It appears that women were active in building up reputations by gossip, deploying counter-magic and accusing suspects; crystallization into formal prosecution, however, needed the intervention of men, preferably of fairly high status in the community.” (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, pp. 264-65, 270, 273, 282.)
Deborah Willis’s study of “Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England” similarly finds it “clear … that women were actively involved in making witchcraft accusations against their female neighbours”:
[Alan] Macfarlane finds that as many women as men informed against witches in the 291 Essex cases he studied; about 55 percent of those who believed they had been bewitched were female. The number of witchcraft quarrels that began between women may actually have been higher; in some cases, it appears that the husband as “head of household” came forward to make statements on behalf of his wife, although the central quarrel had taken place between her and another woman. … It may, then, be misleading to equate “informants” with “accusers”: the person who gave a statement to authorities was not necessarily the person directly quarreling with the witch. Other studies support a figure in the range of 60 percent. In Peter Rushton’s examination of slander cases in the Durham church courts, women took action against other women who had labeled them witches in 61 percent of the cases. … J.A. Sharpe also notes the prevalence of women as accusers in seventeenth-century Yorkshire cases, concluding that “on a village level witchcraft seems to have been something peculiarly enmeshed in women’s quarrels.” To a considerable extent, then, village-level witch-hunting was women’s work. (Willis, Malevolent Nurture, pp. 35-36.)
These comments and data serve as a reminder that gendercide against women may be initiated and perpetrated, substantially or predominantly, by “other women,” just as gendercide against men is carried out overwhelmingly by “other men.” The case of female infanticide can also be cited in this regard. Patriarchal power, however, was ubiquitous at all later stages of witchcraft proceedings. Men were exclusively the prosecutors, judges, jailers, and executioners — of women and men alike — in Europe’s emerging modern legal system.
Witch-hunts today
Few people are aware that witch-hunts still claim thousands of lives every year, especially in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and above all in South Africa.
Witch-hunts in South Africa have become “a national scourge,” according to Phumele Ntombele-Nzimande of the country’s Commission on Gender Equality. (Quoted in Gilbert Lewthwaite, “South Africans go on witch hunts,” Baltimore Sun, September 27, 1998.) The phenomenon is centered in the country’s poverty-stricken Northern Province, where “legislators counted 204 witchcraft-related killings [from 1985-95] … Police counted 312 for the same period. Everybody agreed both numbers were gross underestimates.” (Neely Tucker, “Season of the Witch Haunts Africa,” The Toronto Star, August 1, 1999.) In 1996 The Observer (UK) reported that “the precise statistics are not known, but the deaths from witch-burning episodes number in the hundreds each year and the trend appears to be on the rise.” (David Beresford, “Ancient superstitions, fear of witches cast spell on new nation,” reprinted in The Ottawa Citizen, June 18, 1996.)
As with its European predecessor, witch-hunting in South Africa is closely tied not only to prevailing superstitions, but to socio-economic pressures, natural disasters, and personal jealousies. In the Northern Province, “among the poorly educated rural residents, traditional healers and clairvoyants claiming supernatural powers hold broad sway. And hunger, poverty, and unemployment can create jealousies that can quickly turn to anger and vengeance.” (Lewthwaite, “South Africans go on witch hunts.”) Likewise, Peter Alexander reports that “In a region of intense poverty and little education, villagers are quick to blame any adverse act of fate on black magic.” These traditional tendencies have been exacerbated by a recent hysteria (extending to Kenya and Zimbabwe) over the very real phenomenon of “ritual killings related to witchcraft,” which “include the removal of organs and limbs from the victims — the genitals, hands or the head, all of which are believed to bring good luck.” (Alexander, “‘Witches’ get protection from superstitious mobs,” The Daily Telegraph, May 26, 1997.) Such ritual murders often bring “retribution” against innocents accused of witchcraft.
The intensity of the persecution and vigilantism in South Africa has reached such levels that no fewer than ten villages have been established in the Northern Province, populated exclusively by accused “witches” whose lives are at risk in their home communities. One such settlement, Helena, counted among its residents 62-year-old Esther Rasesemola, who “was accused in 1990 of being a witch after lightning struck her village”:
A group of people visited the Inkanga [village witch-doctor] to see who was responsible. When they returned, it was my brother-in-law who told the rest of the village that I was responsible. He owed me money and I think he did it to get rid of me because he did not want to pay the money back. People in the village became convinced I was a witch. They came to my house at night and burnt it down and took all my belongings. Then they put me in a truck and drove me to a deserted place and dropped me off with my husband and my three children. They told me never to come back to the village or they would kill me. My husband died two years after we were expelled. My children have gone away and now I have nothing. I don’t believe in witchcraft. It is just superstitious belief. (Quoted in Alexander, “‘Witches’ get protection.”)
Gilbert Lewthwaite of the Baltimore Sun described the case of Violet Dangale, a 42-year-old woman who “was driven from her home 30 months ago by relatives and neighbours who accused her of being a witch growing rich from the work of zombies, as the ‘living dead’ are known.” Now she was “penniless and in fear for her life,” living in Tshilamba, another of the refuges for accused witches. Her “main accuser was her uncle. He first accused her father of using zombies to enrich himself. Then he turned on her, suggesting that she enjoyed her share of the family’s wealth through witchcraft. … As the accusations and threats grew stronger, the Dangale family fled their homes in Dzimauli.” “They said I was a witch,” Dangale told Lewthwaite. “I don’t know anything about witchcraft. I don’t believe in zombies. Since I was born, I never saw a zombie.” (Lewthwaite, “South Africans go on witch hunts.”)
Both of these women were luckier than 65-year-old Linah Seabi, “a sorghum beer brewer … [who] was charged with killing an elderly woman with a poisonous potion. More than 200 villagers stormed Seabi’s house in late May [1991], beat her and burned her to death with straw thatch from the roof of her house.” (Nina Shapiro, “Wave of witch hunts sweeps South African countryside,” The Toronto Star, September 19, 1991.) In December 1998, “Francina Sebatsana, 75, and Desia Mamafa, 55 … were burned to death on pyres of wood in the village of Wydhoek,” in the Northern Province, for alleged witchcraft. “Eleven men, ages 21 to 50″ were charged with her murder. (Lewthwaite, “South Africans go on witch hunts.”)
The gendering of the European witch-hunts appears to be closely duplicated in the South African case. As the above accounts suggest, “traditionally, it is women who are accused of witchcraft” (Alexander, “‘Witches’ get police protection”). Especially vulnerable are “defenceless elderly women, against whom the actions are taken without resistance,” according to Northern Province Premier Ngoako Ramatlhodi. “That women most often are the victims of witch hunts stems from attitudes toward gender,” writes Nina Shapiro of The Toronto Star:
“In our culture, men go out in the afternoon, women remain in the home,” said Russell Molefe, a local journalist. People believe women sit at home concocting potions, he said. Older women are suspected, according to Lebowa police lieutenant Mohlabi Tlomatsana, simply because they are alive. “People will think ‘Why has she not died? Probably because she is a witch.’” (Shapiro, “Wave of witch hunts.”)
However, as in the European case-study, “these days almost a third of victims of men” (Alexander, “‘Witches’ get police protection.”) Nonetheless, approximately 30 percent of accused witches are male — reflecting men’s prominence as nangas, or traditional healers. Anton La Guardia describes the case of “Credo Mutwa, southern Africa’s best-known practising healer … [who] said he had been accosted by a mob and stabbed several times. He lay bleeding on the ground and waited helplessly to die as his assailants poured petrol and prepared to set it alight. Mr. Mutwa … said he was saved by the same superstition which was about to claim his life. ‘A young man shouted, “His ghost will haunt you.” They vanished, leaving me like a fish on dry land.’” (La Guardia, “South Africa’s non-political witch-hunts,” The Daily Telegraph, September 9, 1998.)
As in all these campaigns, it is difficult to assign particular responsibility for fuelling the anti-witch hysteria. Although they may themselves be accused of witchcraft, it is also generally the nangas who are called upon to point out “suspicious” persons who can be accused as witches: according to one South African police sergeant, “Generally, if people believe there is a witch in their village, they will consult the [witch-doctor]. He or she will then ’sniff out’ the witch. The person who is accused will then be killed or ordered to leave the village.” (Alexander, “‘Witches’ get police protection.”) Village males usually carry out the murders and other acts of terrorism. But as in the European case-study, patterns of gossip and rumour are central to the process — and to shielding the perpetrators from justice. South African police inspector Matome Mamabolo reports: “If someone is accused of murdering a witch, the community tends to support them by supplying money for an advocate when the case comes to court. There is a solidarity there — after all, that person is accused of ridding the village of a witch.” (Quoted in Alexander, “‘Witches’ get police protection.”)
Much the same pattern is evident in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, although the gender of the victims may be more even. In August 1999, Paul Harris of the Sunday Telegraph reported that
Lynch mobs have killed hundreds of Tanzanians whom they accuse of witchcraft as black magic hysteria sweeps East Africa. Most of the usually elderly victims have been beaten or burnt to death by gangs of youths. Some old women have been singled out simply because they have red eyes — regarded as a sign of sorcery by their assailants. The condition is actually caused by years of toiling in smoky kitchens cooking family meals. … Police say 357 suspected witches have been killed in the past 18 months, but the Ministry of Home Affairs believes that the true figure is much higher. A departmental survey said as many as 5,000 people were lynched between 1994 and 1998. (Paul Harris, “Hundreds burnt to death in Tanzanian witch-hunt,” Sunday Telegraph, August 22, 1999.)
In Zimbabwe, as in neighbouring South Africa, the witch-hunts also seem closely related to “the black market demand for human body parts, which are used in making evil potions.” The upsurge in such practices, the ritual murders they require, and the vengefulness that results against accused “witches,” are all linked to the country’s precipitous economic decline. “It’s obvious the cause is economic,” says Gordon Chavanduka, head of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association (which counts 50,000 members). “The worse the economy gets, the more political tension there is in society, the more frustrated and frightened people get. They turn to witchcraft to gain riches or to hurt their enemies.” (Neely Tucker, “Season of the witch haunts Africa,” The Toronto Star, August 1, 1999.)
In the Kenyan case, as was also true in a handful of European countries, the witch-hunts appear predominantly to target males. A British sociologist, J.F.M. Middleton, records the conviction of the Lugbara tribe of Kenya that
a witch is a man [emphasis added] who perverts a mystical power of kinship for his own selfish ends and is therefore an evil person. Witches in general are given both physical and moral attributes: a witch has greyish skin, red eyes, a physical deformity; he may travel about upside down; he is bad tempered, secretive, petty and jealous; he is thought to practice incest and cannibalism. The distinction between witchcraft, a mystical activity, and sorcery, the use of material objects, was widespread in eastern Africa, Dr. Middleton said. When, as in Lugbara, the basic principles of organization were unilineal descent and seniority by generation it would be expected that men were believed to practise witchcraft, whereas women should have the less important role of sorcerer. (“How to recognize witches,” The Times [UK], September 5, 1997.)
In Kenya in 1993, killings among the Gusii tribe were occurring at the rate of one a week. “In most cases … village mobs several hundred strong locked the victims inside thatch-roof houses and set them on fire. … According to tribal elders, the Gusii have always executed people found to be witches. Sanslaus Anunda, a 99-year-old tribal elder, said that during his youth, villagers had a foolproof method for determining guilt. The most respected men in the community would call a meeting. Next, they would smear local herbs on the hands of the suspect and that of a second, innocent man [emphasis added]. Both men would be ordered to dip their hands into a pot of boiling water, then return in five days. If the suspect was a witch, burns would appear on his hands. However, Anunda insists, the innocent man’s hands would remain unscarred.” (Tammerlin Drummong, “Kenya: Dozens die in witch hunts,” The Ottawa Citizen, August 28, 1993.)
A trend of predominantly male victimization may also be evident in West Africa, where a bizarre wave of accusations of “penis-snatching” has come to light. The Reuters news agency reported in 1996 that “eight men in Accra, Ghana, were accused of using witchcraft to snatch penises. Their motivation was allegedly to return the sexual organs in return for cash. Mobs attacked them … two died and six were seriously injured. The police examined all the alleged victims and found their genitals intact. … [But] the ‘victims’ believed that sorcerers only had to touch them to make the genitals shrink or disappear completely.” (“‘Witches’ steal penises in Ghana,” Reuters dispatch, January 17, 1996.) D. Trull reported in 1997 that “the killings of alleged ‘penis snatchers’” had been reported “along the west coast from Cameroon to Nigeria.” (See Trull, “Witches Protection Program”.)
Other reports of witch-hunting vigilantism have come from Congo, where “The Congolese Human Rights Observatory … announced that more than 60 people had been burned or buried alive since 1990 — including 40 in 1996. The victims were accused, often by members of their own family, of being witches.” (See “South Africa Witch Killings”, citing Reuters dispatch, October 2, 1996.) In the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), some 14,000 children in the capital, Kinshasa, alone have been accused of sorcery and expelled from their homes; “the unlucky ones are murdered by their own family members before they escape.” (See Jeremy Vine, “Congo witch-hunt’s child victims”, BBC News, December 22, 1999. For a recent report on accused child witches in Congo, see James Astill, Congo casts out its ‘child witches’, The Guardian (UK), 11 May 2003.)
More to come…
Lord Aerendil )O(
The other day in my respose to your accusations of Gendercide and the Obliteration of the male Witch I said that I could not argue with your figures (Yet).
Well I have been doing considerable research to prove you dead wrong!
Firstly, the Inquisition, in France at least did not begin with Witch hunts. And the targets of the Inquisition and Rome were not Witches but Cathars.
Catharism was a name given to a Christian religious sect with dualistic and gnostic elements that appeared in the Languedoc region of France and other parts of Europe in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries. These were know to the common people as “The Good Men”, Catharism had its roots in the Paulician movement in Armenia and the Bogomils of Bulgaria with whom the Paulicians merged. They also became influenced by dualist and, perhaps, Manichaean beliefs.
Like many medieval movements, there were various schools of thought and practice amongst the Cathari; some were dualistic, others Gnostic, some closer to orthodoxy while abstaining from an acceptance of Catholic doctrines. The dualist theology was the most prominent, however, and was based upon the complete incompatibility of love and power. As matter was seen as a manifestation of power, it was also incompatible with love. They did not believe in one all-encompassing God, but in two, both equal and comparable in status. They held that the physical world was evil and created by Rex Mundi (translated from Latin as “king of the world”), who encompassed all that was corporeal, chaotic and powerful; the second God, the one whom they worshipped, was entirely disincarnate: a being or principle of pure spirit and completely unsullied by the taint of matter. He was the God of love, order and peace.
According to some Cathars, the purpose of man’s life on Earth was to transcend matter, perpetually renouncing anything connected with the principle of power and thereby attained union with the principle of love. According to others, man’s purpose was to reclaim or redeem matter, spiritualizing and transforming it.
This placed them at odds with the Catholic Church in regarding material creation, on behalf of which Jesus had died, as intrinsically evil and implying that God, whose word had created the world in the beginning, was a usurper. Furthermore, as the Cathars saw matter as intrinsically evil, they denied that Jesus could become incarnate and still be the son of God. Cathars vehemently repudiated the significance of the crucifixion and the cross. In fact, to the Cathars, Rome’s opulent and luxurious church seemed a palpable embodiment and manifestation on Earth of Rex Mundi’s sovereignty.
The Catholic Church regarded the sect as dangerously heretical. Faced with the rapid spread of the movement across the Languedoc region the Church first sought peaceful attempts at conversion, undertaken by Dominicans. These were not very successful, and after the murder on 15 January 1208 of the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau by a knight in the employ of Count Raymond of Toulouse, the Church called for a crusade, which the French carried out and was known as the Albigensian Crusade. The Papal Legate had involved himself in a dispute between the rivals Count of Baux and Count Raymond of Toulouse. It is possible that his assassination had little to do with the Cathar heresy. The anti-Cathar Albigensian Crusade, and the inquisition which followed it, entirely eradicated the Cathars. The Albigensian Crusade was undertaken by the French for mainly political purposes as it enabled France to conquer the until then independent principalities, such as Toulouse, of Southern France. The excuse of eradicating Cathars led to a massive genocide in the South of France. The purpose of the genocide may well have been to remove the population resource from which the hitherto independent rulers of the South had drawn their armies and resources.
Indeed 0ver 70% of those executed as Cathars and Heretics to the Church of Rome were men the remainder women over the age of 12. But, not one of these men were Witches. I will do more digging but this is the beginning of my disproving your and others beliefs in male Witches.
The quest for the truth continues!
Lord Aerendil )O(
Now for Spain:
The Spanish Inquisition was an ecclesiastical tribunal started in 1478 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms, and to replace the medieval inquisition which was under papal control. The new body was under the direct control of the Spanish monarchy. It was not definitively abolished until 1834, during the reign of Isabella II.
The Inquisition, as an ecclesiastical tribunal, had jurisdiction only over baptized Christians. This included those who practiced forms of Christianity other than Catholicism, and at the time were considered heretics by Catholic Church and newly formed Spanish kingdoms. The Inquisition worked in large part to ensure the orthodoxy of recent converts.
The start of the Inquisition
Alonso de Hojeda, a Dominican from Seville, convinced Queen Isabel of the existence of Crypto-Judaism among Andalusian conversos during her stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478.[5] A report, produced at the request of the monarchs by Pedro González de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville, and by the Segovian Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, corroborated this assertion. The monarchs decided to introduce the Inquisition to Castile to uncover and do away with false converts, and requested the Pope’s assent. At first the request was turned down for a number of reasons. One reason was that they had requested the Spanish Inquisition to be under the control of the monarchs of Spain. This in turn would lessen papal authority over the clergy involved and make methods difficult to keep in line with official papal rules of inquisition, and instead easily become a mere political and semi-military tool of Spain. Ferdinand pressured Sixtus IV by threatening to withdraw military support at a time when the Turks were threating Catholic Europe. On November 1, 1478, Pope Sixtus IV published the bill Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus, through which the Inquisition was established in the Kingdom of Castile. The bill also gave the monarchs exclusive authority to name the inquisitors. The first two inquisitors, Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín were not named, however, until two years later, on September 27, 1480 in Medina del Campo.
At first, the activity of the Inquisition was limited to the dioceses of Seville and Cordoba, where Alonso de Hojeda had detected the center of converso activity. The first auto de fe was celebrated in Seville on February 6, 1481: six people were burned alive. The sermon was given by the same Alonso de Hojeda whose suspicions had given birth to the Inquisition. From there, the Inquisition grew rapidly in the Kingdom of Castile. By 1492, tribunals existed in eight Castilian cities: Ávila, Córdoba, Jaén, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo, and Valladolid.
Establishing the new Inquisition in the Kingdom of Aragón was more difficult. In reality, Ferdinand did not resort to new appointments, he simply resuscitated the old Pontifical Inquisition, submitting it to his direct control. The population of Aragón was obstinately opposed to the Inquisition. In addition, differences between Ferdinand and Sixtus IV prompted the latter to promulgate a new bull categorically prohibiting the Inquisition’s extension to Aragon. In this bull, the Pope unambiguously criticized the procedures of the Inquisitorial court, affirming that,
many true and faithful Christians, because of the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves and other low people—and still less appropriate—without tests of any kind, have been locked up in secular prisons, tortured and condemned like relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and properties, and given over to the secular arm to be executed, at great danger to their souls, giving a pernicious example and causing scandal to many.[6]
Nevertheless, pressure by Ferdinand caused the Pope to suspend this bull,[7] and even promulgate another one, on October 17, 1483, naming Tomás de Torquemada Inquisidor General of Aragón, Valencia and Catalonia. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII attempted to allow appeals to Rome against the Inquisition, but Ferdinand in December 1484 and again in 1509 decreed death and confiscation for anyone trying to make use of such procedures without royal permission.[8] With this, the Inquisition became the only institution that held authority across all the realms of the Spanish monarchy, and, in all of them, a useful mechanism at the service of the crown. However, the cities of Aragón continued resisting, and even saw revolt, as in Teruel from 1484 to 1485. However, the murder of Inquisidor Pedro Arbués in Zaragoza on September 15, 1485, caused public opinion to turn against the conversos and in favour of the Inquisition. In Aragón, the Inquisitorial courts were focused specifically on members of the powerful converso minority, ending their influence in the Aragonese administration.
The Inquisition was extremely active between 1480 and 1530. Different sources give different estimates of the number of trials and executions in this period; Henry Kamen estimates about 2,000 executed, based on the documentation of the Autos de Fé, the great majority being conversos of Jewish origin. He offers striking statistics: 91.6% of those judged in Valencia between 1484 and 1530 and 99.3% of those judged in Barcelona between 1484 and 1505 were of Jewish origin.[9]
[edit] Repression of Jews
The number of Jews who left Spain is not even approximately known. Historians of the period give extremely high figures: Juan de Mariana speaks of 800,000 people, and Don Isaac Abravanel of 300,000. Modern estimates are much lower: Henry Kamen estimates that, of a population of approximately 80,000 Jews, about one half or 40,000 chose emigration.[10] The Jews of the kingdom of Castile emigrated mainly to Portugal (from where they were expelled in 1497) and to Morocco. However, according to Henry Kamen, the Jews of the kingdom of Aragon, went “to adjacent Christian lands, mainly to Italy,” rather than to Muslim lands as is often assumed.[11] Much later the Sefardim, descendants of Spanish Jews, established communities in many cities of Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire.
Jews were baptised in the three months before the deadline for expulsion, some 40,000 if one accepts the totals given by Kamen: most of these undoubtedly to avoid expulsion, rather than a sincere change of faith. These conversos were the principal concern of the Inquisition; continuing to practice Judaism put them at risk of denunciation and trial.
The most intense period of persecution of conversos lasted until 1530. From 1531 to 1560, however, the percentage of conversos among the Inquisition trials dropped to 3% of the total. There was a rebirth of persecutions when a group of crypto-Jews was discovered in Quintanar de la Orden in 1588; and there was a rise in denunciations of conversos in the last decade of the 16th century. At the beginning of the 17th century, some conversos who had fled to Portugal began to return to Spain, fleeing the persecution of the Portuguese Inquisition, founded in 1532. This led to a rapid increase in the trials of crypto-Jews, among them a number of important financiers. In 1691, during a number of Autos de Fe in Majorca, 36 chuetas, or conversos of Majorca, were burned.
During the 18th century the number of conversos accused by the Inquisition decreased significantly. Manuel Santiago Vivar, tried in Cordoba in 1818, was the last person tried for being a crypto-Jew.
[edit] Repression of Muslims
The Inquisition did not exclusively target Jewish conversos (marranos) and Protestants, but also the moriscos, converts to Catholicism from Islam. The moriscos were mostly concentrated in the recently conquered kingdom of Granada, in Aragon, and in Valencia. Officially, all Muslims in Castile had been converted to Christianity in 1502. Those in Aragon and Valencia were obliged to convert by Charles I’s decree of 1526, as most had been forcibly baptized during the Revolt of the Brotherhoods (1519–1523) and these baptisms were declared to be valid.
Many Moriscos were suspected of practicing Islam in secret, and the jealousy with which they guarded the privacy of their domestic life prevented the verification of this suspicion.[12] Initially they were not severely persecuted, but experienced a policy of peaceful evangelization, a policy never followed with Jewish converts. There were various reasons for this: in the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon, a large majority of the moriscos were under the jurisdiction of the nobility and persecution would have been viewed as a frontal assault on the economic interests of this powerful social class. Still, fears ran high among the population that the Moriscos were traitorous, especially in Granada. The coast was regularly raided by the Barbary pirates backed by the Ottoman Empire, which did not augur good relations between Christians and (former) Muslims as the Moriscos were suspected of aiding the North African raiders. As a result, rather than being seen as full Christians, the moriscos were kept separate and viewed with suspicion.
In the second half of the century, late in the reign of Philip II, conditions worsened between Christians and Moriscos. The 1568–1570 Morisco Revolt in Granada was harshly suppressed, and the Inquisition intensified its attention upon the moriscos. From 1570 morisco cases became predominant in the tribunals of Zaragoza, Valencia and Granada; in the tribunal of Granada, between 1560 and 1571, 82% of those accused were moriscos.[13] Thus according to Kamen, the moriscos did not experience the same harshness as Jewish conversos and Protestants, and the number of capital punishments was proportionally less.[14]
In 1609 King Philip III, upon the advice of his financial adviser the Duke of Lerma and Archbishop of Valencia Juan de Ribera, decreed the Expulsion of the Moriscos. Hundreds of thousands of converts from Islam to Catholicism were expelled, some of them probably sincere Christians. This was further fueled by the religious intolerance of Archbishop Ribera who quoted the Old Testament texts ordering the enemies of God to be slain without mercy and setting forth the duties of kings to extirpate them.[15] The edict required: ‘The Moriscos to depart, under the pain of death and confiscation, without trial or sentence… to take with them no money, bullion, jewels or bills of exchange…. just what they could carry.’[16] So successful was the enterprise, in the space of months, Spain was emptied of its Moriscos and Moors. Expelled were the Moors of Aragon, Murcia, Catalonia, Castile, Mancha and Extremadura. As for the Moriscos of Granada, such as the Herrador family who held positions in the Church and magistracy, they still had to struggle against exile and confiscation.[17]
An indeterminate number of moriscos remained in Spain and, during the 17th century, the Inquisition pursued some trials against them of minor importance: according to Kamen, between 1615 and 1700, cases against moriscos constituted only 9 percent of those judged by the Inquisition.
[edit] Demographic consequences
In December 2008, a genetic study of the current population of the Iberian Peninsula, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, estimated that about 10% have North-African as ancestors and 20% have Sephardi Jews as ancestors. Since there is no direct link between genetic makeup and religious affiliation, however, it is difficult to draw direct conclusions between their findings and forced or voluntary conversion[18]. Nevertheless, the Sephardic result is in contradiction [19][20][21][22][23] or not replicated in all the body of genetic studies done in Iberia and has been later questioned by the authors themselves [24][25][26][27] and by Stephen Oppenheimer who estimates that much earlier migrations, 5000 to 10,000 years ago from the Eastern Mediterranean might also have accounted for the Sephardic estimates: “They are really assuming that they are looking at his migration of Jewish immigrants, but the same lineages could have been introduced in the Neolithic”[28]. The rest of genetic studies done in Spain estimate the Moorish contribution ranging from 2.5/3.4%[29] to 7.7%[30].
[edit] Repression of Protestants
Conversos saw the 1516 arrival of Charles I, the new king of Spain, as a possible end to the Inquisition, or at least a reduction of its influence. Nevertheless, despite reiterated petitions from the Cortes of Castile and Aragon, the new monarch left the inquisitorial system intact.[31]
During the 16th century, however, the majority of trials were not focused on conversos. Instead, the Inquisition became an efficient mechanism for pruning the buds of Protestantism that had begun reaching into Spain. Some claim that a large percentage of these Protestants were of Jewish origin.[citation needed]
Despite much popular myth about the Inquisition relating to Protestants, it dealt with very few cases involving actual Protestants, as there were so few in Spain. About 100 persons in Spain were found to be Protestants and turned over to the secular authorities for execution in the 1560s[citation needed] and in the last decades of the century, an additional 200 Spaniards were accused of being followers of Luther. “Most of them were in no sense Protestants…Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions, were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as ‘Lutheran.’ Disrespect to church images, and eating meat on forbidden days, were taken as signs of heresy.”[32]
The first of these trials were those against the sect of mystics known as the “Alumbrados” of Guadalajara and Valladolid. The trials were long, and ended with prison sentences of differing lengths, though none of the sect were executed. Nevertheless, the subject of the “Alumbrados” put the Inquisition on the trail of many intellectuals and clerics who, interested in Erasmian ideas, had strayed from orthodoxy (which is striking because both Charles I and Philip II of Spain were confessed admirers of Erasmus). Such was the case with the humanist Juan de Valdés, who was forced to flee to Italy to escape the process that had been begun against him, and the preacher, Juan de Ávila, who spent close to a year in prison.
The first trials against Lutheran groups, as such, took place between 1558 and 1562, at the beginning of the reign of Philip II, against two communities of Protestants from the cities of Valladolid and Seville.[33] The trials signaled a notable intensification of the Inquisition’s activities. A number of enormous Autos de Fe were held, some of them presided over by members of the royal family.[34] After 1562, though the trials continued, the repression was much reduced, and it is estimated that only a dozen Spaniards were burned alive for Lutheranism by the end of the 16th century, although some 200 faced trial.[35] The Autos de Fe of the mid-century virtually put an end to Spanish Protestantism which was, throughout, a small phenomenon to begin with – last remainders claimed to have survived in Netanya, Israel in the form of secluded orders, led by Irene Molochovski.
Censorship
As one manifestation of the Counter-Reformation, the Spanish Inquisition worked actively to impede the diffusion of heretical ideas in Spain by producing “Indexes” of prohibited books. Such lists of prohibited books were common in Europe a decade before the Inquisition published its first. The first Index published in Spain in 1551 was, in reality, a reprinting of the Index published by the University of Louvain in 1550, with an appendix dedicated to Spanish texts. Subsequent Indexes were published in 1559, 1583, 1612, 1632, and 1640. The Indexes included an enormous number of books of all types, though special attention was dedicated to religious works, and, particularly, vernacular translations of the bible.
Included the Indexes, at one point, were many of the great works of Spanish literature. Also, a number of religious writers who are today considered saints by the Catholic Church saw their works appear in the Indexes. At first, this might seem counter-intuitive or even nonsensical — how were these Spanish authors published in the first place if their texts were only to be prohibited by the Inquisition and placed in the Index? The answer lies in the process of publication and censorship in Early Modern Spain. Books in Early Modern Spain faced prepublication licensing and approval (which could include modification) by both secular and religious authorities. However, once approved and published, the circulating text also faced the possibility of post-hoc censorship by being denounced to the Inquisition — sometimes decades later. Likewise, as Catholic theology evolved, once prohibited texts might be removed from the Index.
At first, inclusion in the Index meant total prohibition of a text; however, this proved not only impractical and unworkable, but also contrary to the goals of having a literate and well educated clergy. Works with one line of suspect dogma would be prohibited in their entirety, despite the remainder of the text’s sound dogma. In time, a compromise solution was adopted in which trusted Inquisition officials blotted out words, lines or whole passages of otherwise acceptable texts, thus allowing these expurgated editions to circulate. Although in theory the Indexes imposed enormous restrictions on the diffusion of culture in Spain, some historians, such as Henry Kamen, argue that such strict control was impossible in practice and that there was much more liberty in this respect than is often believed. And Irving Leonard has conclusively demonstrated that, despite repeated royal prohibitions, romances of chivalry, such as Amadis of Gaul, found their way to the New World with the blessing of the Inquisition. Moreover, with the coming of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, increasing numbers of licenses to possess and read prohibited texts were granted.
Despite repeated publication of the Indexes and a large bureaucracy of censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede the flowering of Spanish literature’s “Siglo de Oro,” although almost all of its major authors crossed paths with the Holy Office at one point or another. Among the Spanish authors included in the Index are: Bartolomé Torres Naharro, Juan del Enzina, Jorge de Montemayor, Juan de Valdés and Lope de Vega, as well as the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes and the Cancionero General by Hernando del Castillo. La Celestina, which was not included in the Indexes of the 16th century, was expurgated in 1632 and prohibited in its entirety in 1790. Among the non-Spanish authors prohibited were Ovid, Dante, Rabelais, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Jean Bodin and Thomas More, known in Spain as Tomás Moro. One of the most outstanding and best known cases in which the Inquisition directly confronted literary activity is with Fray Luis de León, noted humanist and religious writer of converso origin, who was imprisoned for four years (from 1572 to 1576) for having translated the Song of Songs directly from Hebrew.
Other Offenses
Although the Inquisition was created to halt the advance of heresy, it also occupied itself with a wide variety of offences that only indirectly could be related to religious heterodoxy. Of a total of 49,092 trials from the period 1560–1700 registered in the archive of the Suprema, appear the following: judaizantes (5,007); moriscos (11,311); Lutherans (3,499); alumbrados (149); superstitions (3,750); heretical propositions (14,319); bigamy (2,790); solicitation (1,241); offences against the Holy Office of the Inquisition (3,954); miscellaneous (2,575).[citation needed]
This data demonstrates that not only New Christians (conversos of Jewish or Islamic descent) and Protestants faced investigation, but also professing Catholics could be targeted for various reasons.
The category “superstitions” includes trials related to witchcraft. The witch-hunt in Spain had much less intensity than in other European countries (particularly France, England, and Germany). One remarkable case was that of Logroño, in which the witches of Zugarramurdi in Navarre were persecuted. During the auto de fé that took place in Logroño on November 7 and November 8, 1610, 6 people were burned and another 5 burned in effigy.[36] In general, nevertheless, the Inquisition maintained a sceptical attitude towards cases of witchcraft, considering it as a mere superstition without any basis. Alonso de Salazar Frías, who, after the trials of Logroño took the Edict of Faith to various parts of Navarre, noted in his report to the Suprema that, “There were no witches nor bewitched in the region after beginning to speak and write about them”.[37]
Included under the rubric of heretical propositions were verbal offences, from outright blasphemy to questionable statements regarding religious beliefs, from issues of sexual morality, to misbehaviour of the clergy. Many were brought to trial for affirming that simple fornication (sex without the explicit aim of procreation) was not a sin or for putting in doubt different aspects of Christian faith such as Transubstantiation or the virginity of Mary. Also, members of the clergy itself were occasionally accused of heretical propositions. These offences rarely lead to severe penalties.
The Inquisition also pursued offences against morals, at times in open conflict with the jurisdictions of civil tribunals. In particular, there were numerous trials for bigamy, a relatively frequent offence in a society that only permitted divorce under the most extreme circumstances. In the case of men, the penalty was five years in the galley (tantamount to a death sentence). Women too were accused of bigamy. Also, many cases of solicitation during confession were adjudicated, indicating a strict vigilance over the clergy.
Inquisitorial repression of the sexual offence of sodomy, considered, according to Canon Law, as a crime against nature, merits separate attention. This included some cases of homosexuality, rape, and separately bestiality. Those convicted were punished by death by civil authorities.
In 1506 at Seville the Inquisition made a special investigation into sodomy, causing many arrests and many fugitives and burning 12 persons, but in 1509 the Suprema in Castile declared that crime not within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition deciding that cases of sodomy could not be adjudicated, unless related to heresy. Alleging that sodomy had been introdued to Spain by the Moors, in 1524 the Spanish Ambassador to Rome obtained a special commission from Clement VII for the Holy Office to curb its spread by investigating laymen and clergy in the territories of Aragon, whether or not it was related to heresy; and proceeding according to local, municipal law in spite of the resistance by local bishops to this usurpation of their authority.
The tribunal of Zaragoza distinguished itself for its severity in judging these offences: between 1571—1579, 101 men accused of sodomy were processed and at least 35 were executed. In total, between 1570 and 1630 there were 534 trials (incl. 187 for homosexuality, 245 for besiality, and 111 with unknown specification of the charges) with 102 executions (incl. 27 for homosexuality, 64 for bestiality and 11 uncertain cases).
The first sodomite was burned by the Inquisition in Valencia in 1572, and those accused included 19% clergy, 6% nobles, 37% workers, 19% servants, and 18% soldiers and sailors. [38] A growing reluctance to convict those who, unlike heretics, could not escape by confession and penance led after 1630 to greater leniency. Torture decreased: in Valencia 21% of sodomites were tortured prior to 1630, but only 4% afterwards. The last execution in persona for sodomy by the Inquisition took place in Zaragoza in April 1633. In total, out of about 1,000 convicted of sodomy – 170 were actually burnt at the stake, including 84 condemned for bestiality and 75 for homosexuality, with 11 cases where the exact character of the charges is not known.
Nearly all of almost 500 cases of sodomy between persons concerned the relationship between an older man and an adolescent, often by coercion; with only a few cases where the couple were consenting homosexual adults. About 100 of the total involved allegations of child abuse. Adolescents were generally punished more leniently than adults, but only when they were very young (under ca. 12 years) or when the case clearly concerned rape, where they had a chance in avoiding punishment altogether. As a rule, the Inquisition condemned to death only those “sodomites” over the age of 25 years. As about half of those tried were under this age, it explains the relatively small percent of death sentences[39].
In 1815, Francisco Xavier de Mier y Campillo, the Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition and the Bishop of Almería, suppressed Freemasonry and denounced the lodges as “societies which lead to atheism, to sedition and to all errors and crimes.”[40] He then instituted a purge during which Spaniards could be arrested on the charge of being “suspected of Freemasonry”.[40]
The historian Hernando del Pulgar, contemporary of Ferdinand and Isabella, estimated that the Inquisition had burned at the stake 2,000 people and reconciled another 15,000 by 1490 (just one decade after the Inquisition began).[63]
Modern historians have begun to study the documentary records of the Inquisition. The archives of the Suprema, today held by the National Historical Archive of Spain (Archivo Histórico Nacional), conserves the annual relations of all processes between 1540 and 1700. This material provides information about 44,674 judgements, the latter studied by Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras. These 44,674 cases include 826 executions in persona and 778 in effigie. This material, however, is far from being complete – for example, the tribunal of Cuenca is entirely omitted, because no relaciones de causas from this tribunal has been found, and significant gaps concern some other tribunals (e.g. Valladolid). Many more cases not reported to Suprema are known from the other sources (e.g. no relaciones de causas from Cuenca has been found, but its original records has been preserved), but were not included in Contreras-Hennigsen’s statistics for the methodological reasons.[64] William Monter estimates 1000 executions between 1530-1630 and 250 between 1630-1730.[65]
The archives of the Suprema only provide information surrounding the processes prior to 1560. To study the processes themselves, it is necessary to examine the archives of the local tribunals; however, the majority have been lost to the devastation of war, the ravages of time or other events. Pierre Dedieu has studied those of Toledo, where 12,000 were judged for offences related to heresy.[66] Ricardo García Cárcel has analyzed those of the tribunal of Valencia.[67] These authors’ investigations find that the Inquisition was most active in the period between 1480 and 1530, and that during this period the percentage condemned to death was much more significant than in the years studied by Henningsen and Contreras. Henry Kamen gives the number of about 2,000 executions in persona in the whole Spain up to 1530.[68]
García Cárcel estimates that the total number processed by the Inquisition throughout its history was approximately 150,000. Applying the percentages of executions that appeared in the trials of 1560-1700—about 2%—the approximate total would be about 3,000 put to death. Nevertheless, very probably this total should be raised keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively. It is likely that the total would be between 3,000 and 5,000 executed.
However, it is impossible to determine the precision of this total, and owing to the gaps in documentation, it is unlikely that the exact number will ever be known.
Not one of these unfortunate martyrs male or female were condemned of Witchcraft, only heresy!
And the search goes on!
Lord Aerendil )O(
I’ve read over your post and have come to the following conclusions:
I do not argue with your numbers and percentages, as I have no facts or figures to support or discredit them.(yet!)
But I do argue the validity of men being Witches.
Further the articles you cite are from a Christian perspective and you will notice, all written by men…
The majority of the males you claim were executed as male Witches were in fact not accused of being Witches at all but of being Heretics and in league with the devil, and in so being, performed dark magick and rituals to cause harm or ensorcellement of good God fearing Christians.
There is in fact no validity to the statement that men were considered Witches before Gerald Gardner first declared himself a male Witch. The role of men was more one of Magician, Sorcerer, Alchemist, High-Priest, Necromancer, Shaman, Witch-doctor etc. No I have to disagree with you, Witch is strictly a feminine definition of a female practitioner of the Craft.
This has nothing to do with Gendercide or as you put it Obliteration of the male Witch.
How can one obliterate something that doesn’t exist? To me, your way of thinking is purely reactionary to feelings of insecurity and failing to recognize the truth and facts. Gerald Gardner, and others like Allister Crowley and more recently Raymond Buckland can be considered Wiccan High-Priests, but this should not be confused with priesthood in Wicca automatically making you a male Witch.
Also, though all Wiccans may consider themselves Witches, not all Witches consider themselves Wiccan. And there is a vast difference between the two. Wicca is a Neo-Pagan Religion, while Witchcraft is aan ancient practice and way of life. There is nothing religious about Witchcraft in itself.
Respectfully yous;
Lord Aerendil )O(
(And no I do not consider myself nor would I ever consider myself a Witch. But I do respect and revere those women I klnow who are true Witches!)
hello… Just comment..
You have done you homework! kudos to you in showing that male witches do exist in the past and present ~ So sad that this is even an issue to some people….♥
Fate, if it is such an issue with some people it is because it is a fallacy that has been perpetrated by the likes of Gerald Gardner, Allister Crowley, Llewellyn, Ray Buckland and their like whose seemingly innocent desire to incorporate men into a Tradition that was originally the unique realm of women is seen by some like myself and others like HPS Lady Fox Fire, HPS Lady Igraine, and HPS Lady Apollonia and hundreds maybe thousands of others who know the truth as just another patriarchal encroachment into the realm of that which is the realm of women.
Had they called themselves Priests, Wizzards, Sorcerers, or Imperial Grand Poobahs, no one would be arguing the validity of their ideas, but they chose to usurp the name Witch and that is an
insult to those who are true Witches. Hence the hoopla!
And as I said to Solitudeone he and his supporters can argue this point until they no longer are full of wind and hot air, but the facts do not change. Men are not Witches and have no rights to the name and all it implies. And if he feels intimidated by strong women and you feel you have to cajole the likes of him like a little boy and stay in his good graces, that’s up to you, but me, I respect the side of truth and facts, and the facts do not lie in your favor.
Blessed Be!
Lord Aerendil )O(