Satan's goal was the corruption of humanity, the destruction of everything good, and the damnation of as many people as possible in hell. The political and religious goals set down by the church leaders were deemed far more important than the consequences to their own values, principles, or morals - and certainly more important than the possible persecution of anyone who might actually be innocent of the charges leveled against them.Ĭhristians in medieval and pre-modern Europe believed that Satan was a real being and that Satan was actively involved in the affairs of humans. Sprenger and Kramer told religious leaders what they wanted to hear and helped make it easier for those leaders to pursue the persecution of witches throughout Europe. It's not too far from the truth to suggest that Sprenger and Kramer were early propagandists, creating a fake resource for authorities in order to help justify what the authorities wanted to do all along. These two Dominican monks wrote a lurid account of what witches were "really" like and what they "really" did - an account which would rival modern science fiction in its creativity, not to mention its fictitiousness. One of the most famous symbols of the Inquisition's witch-craze was the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum ( Witches' Hammer) by Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer. The above image depicts some of the strange and crazy things which medieval Christians believed that witched did at night. Since Christians kneeled, then witches stood on their heads when paying homage to their masters. Most clerics seem to have been rather limited in creativity, so witches were shown as behaving a simplistically opposite fashion from Christians. Very little of people's understanding of witches has anything to do with older, pagan traditions which supposedly were the source of witches and witchcraft. Their creations have passed on into popular cultural images of witches which continue to this day. Almost everything that was "known" at the time about witches was pure fiction, inventions by church authorities who were told that witches were a threat and so had to come up with something to describe. Portrayals of witchcraft in church records can be very amusing. Isn't that ultimately more important than whether the stories were true or not? Creating an enemy of out witches served the goal of increased religious and political cohesion because people would want to draw closer together in order to confront the enemy who wanted to destroy them. People trusted their religious and political leaders to provide them with accurate information, but in reality, the "information" provided was simply whatever furthered their leaders religious and political goals. In the place of real knowledge or information, Christian leaders made things up and created stories which were certain to cause people to hate and fear witches even more. People typically fear that which they don't understand, so witches were doubly damned: they were feared because they were allegedly agents of Satan seeking to undermine Christian society and they were feared because no one really knew what witches did or how. The image here depicts what Christians imagined went on at a court of witches where Satan presided. In the Canary Islands, Aldonca de Vargas was reported to the Inquisition for nothing more than smiling at hearing mention of Mary.Īs a result of this, church authorities tortured and killed thousands of women, and not a few men, in an effort to get them to confess that they flew through the sky, had sexual relations with demons, turned into animals, and engaged in various sorts of black magic. Today the figure of Mary is both popular and important in the Catholic church, but to the Inquisition, it was a possible sign of overemphasizing the feminine aspect of Christianity. The additional persecution of anything which resembled feminine religiosity went to interesting lengths in that devotion to Mary became suspect. This was quite a reversal because in 906 the Canon Episcopi, a church law, declared that belief in the existence and operation of witchcraft was heresy. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull declaring that witches did indeed exist and thus it became a heresy to believe otherwise. Although Pope Gregory IX had authorized the killing of witches back in the 1200s, the fad just didn't catch on. Most of what was passed off as witchcraft were simply fictional creations of the church, but some of it was genuine or almost-genuine practices of pagans and Wiccans.Īs the Inquisition proceeded through the 1400s, its focus shifted from Jews and heretics towards so-called witches. The creation of the concept of devil-worship, followed by its persecution, allowed the church to more easily subordinate people to authoritarian control and openly denigrate women.
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