Ugly History: Witch Hunts - Brian A. Pavlac
In the German town of Nördlingen in 1593,
an innkeeper named Maria Höll found
herself accused of witchcraft.
She was arrested for questioning,
and denied the charges.
She continued to insist she wasn’t a witch
through 62 rounds of torture
before her accusers finally released her.
Rebekka Lemp, accused a few years earlier
in the same town, faced a worse fate.
She wrote to her husband from jail
worrying that she would
confess under torture,
even though she was innocent.
After giving a false confession,
she was burned at the stake
in front of her family.
Höll and Lemp were both victims of the
witch hunts
that occurred in Europe and the American
colonies
from the late 15th century
until the early 18th century.
These witch hunts were not a unified
initiative by a single authority,
but rather a phenomenon that occurred
sporadically
and followed a similar pattern each time.
The term “witch” has taken
on many meanings,
but in these hunts, a witch was someone
who allegedly gained magical powers
by obeying Satan rather than God.
This definition of witchcraft spread
through churches in Western Europe
starting at the end of the 15th century.
It really gained traction after the pope
gave a friar and professor of theology
named Heinrich Kraemer
permission to conduct inquisitions in
search of witches in 1485.
His first, in the town of Innsbruck,
didn’t gain much traction with the local
authorities,
who disapproved of his harsh questioning
of respectable citizens
and shut down his trials.
Undeterred, he wrote a book called the
"Malleus Maleficarum," or "Hammer of Witches."
The text argued for the existence of
witches
and suggested ruthless tactics for hunting
and prosecuting them.
He singled out women as easier targets for
the devil’s influence,
though men could also be witches.
Kraemer’s book spurred others to write
their own books
and give sermons on the
dangers of witchcraft.
According to these texts,
witches practiced rituals including
kissing the Devil’s anus
and poisoning or bewitching targets the
devil singled out for harm.
Though there was no evidence to support
any of these claims,
belief in witches became widespread.
A witch hunt often began
with a misfortune:
a failed harvest, a sick cow,
or a stillborn child.
Community members blamed witchcraft,
and accused each other of being witches.
Many of the accused were people on
the fringes of society:
the elderly, the poor, or social outcasts,
but any member of the community
could be targeted,
even occasionally children.
While religious authorities encouraged
witch hunts,
local secular governments usually carried
out the detainment
and punishment of accused witches.
Those suspected of witchcraft were
questioned and often tortured—
and under torture, thousands of innocent
people confessed to witchcraft
and implicated others in turn.
Because these witch hunts occurred
sporadically over centuries and continents
the specifics varied considerably.
Punishments for convicted witches ranged
from small fines to burning at the stake.
The hunt in which Höll and Lemp were
accused dragged on for nine years,
while others lasted just months.
They could have anywhere from a few to a
few hundred victims.
The motivations of the witch hunters
probably varied as well,
but it seems likely that many weren’t
consciously looking for scapegoats—
instead, they sincerely believed
in witchcraft,
and thought they were doing good by
rooting it out in their communities.
Institutions of power enabled real harm to
be done on the basis of these beliefs.
But there were dissenters all along–
jurists, scholars, and physicians
countered books
like Kraemer’s "Hammer of Witches"
with texts objecting to the
cruelty of the hunts,
the use of forced confessions,
and the lack of evidence of witchcraft.
From the late 17th through the mid-18th
century,
their arguments gained force with the rise
of stronger central governments
and legal norms like due process.
Witch hunting slowly declined until it
disappeared altogether.
Both the onset and demise of these
atrocities came gradually,
out of seemingly ordinary circumstances.
The potential for similar situations,
in which authorities use their powers to
mobilize society against a false threat,
still exists today—
but so does the capacity of reasoned
dissent to combat those false beliefs.
