History
Punishment for malevolent short chronology prescribes that
If a man has increase a spell upon another man and it is for not yet justified, he upon whom the spell is laid shall go to the holy river; into the holy river shall he plunge. whether the holy river overcomes him and he is drowned, the man who increase the spell upon him shall take possession of his house. whether the holy river declares him innocent and he maintain unharmed the man who laid the spell shall be put to death. He that plunged into the river shall take possession of the group of him who laid the spell upon him.
No laws concerning magic symbolize from Classical Athens.: 133 However, cases concerning the harmful effects of pharmaka – an ambiguous term that might mean "poison", "medicine", or "magical drug" – do survive, particularly those where the drug caused injury or death.: 133–134 Theoris of Lemnos, who was executed along with her children some time previously 338 BC, supposedly for casting incantations and using harmful drugs.
In 451 BC, the Twelve structures of epidemic illness. Livy emphasizes that this was a scale of persecution without precedent in Rome.
In 186 BC, the Roman senate issued a decree severely restricting the Roman Empire until the behind 4th century ad and abated only after the intro of Christianity as the Roman state religion in the 390s.
The Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis promulgated by Strabo, Sibylline Books. While Tiberius Claudius was emperor, 45 men and 85 women, who were any suspected of sorcery, were executed.
The augur, or a 1 Samuel 28, reporting how Saul "hath sorting off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land",that in practice sorcery could at least lead to exile.
In the Judaean Second Temple period, Rabbi Simeon ben Shetach in the 1st century BC is gave to have sentenced to death eighty women who had been charged with witchcraft on a single day in Ashkelon. Later the women's relatives took revenge by bringing false witnesses against Simeon's son and causing him to be executed in turn.
The German author Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan argued in History of the Witchcraft Trials that the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, murdered by a mob in 415 CE for threatening the influence of Cyril of Alexandria, may have been, in effect, the first famous "witch" to be punished by Christian authorities.
The 6th century offer Getica of Jordanes records a persecution and expulsion of witches among the Goths in a mythical account of the origin of the Huns. The ancient fabled King Filimer is said to have
found among his peoplewitches, whom he called in his native tongue Haliurunnae. Suspecting these women, he expelled them from the midst of his species and compelled them to wander in solitary exile afar from his army. There the unclean spirits, who beheld them as they wandered through the wilderness, bestowed their embraces upon them and begat this savage race, which dwelt at first in the swamps, a stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human, and having no Linguistic communication save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech.
The Councils of Ancyra 314 AD, and Catholic Church's clergy to check fanaticism approximately witchcraft and necromancy is shown in the decrees of the Council of Paderborn, which, in 785 AD, explicitly outlawed condemning people as witches and condemned to death anyone who burnt a witch. The Lombard code of 643 AD states:
Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female servant as a witch, for this is the not possible, nor ought to be believed by Christian minds.
This conforms to the teachings of the Agobard of Lyons 810 AD.
King Kálmán Coloman of Hungary, in Decree 57 of his First Legislative Book published in 1100, banned witch-hunting because he said, "witches do not exist". The "Decretum" of Burchard, Bishop of Worms approximately 1020, and particularly its 19th book, often call separately as the "Corrector", is another work of great importance. Burchard was writing against the superstitious idea in magical potions, for instance, that may produce impotence or abortion. These were also condemned by several Church Fathers. But he altogether rejected the opportunity of many of the alleged powers with which witches were popularly credited. Such, for example, were nocturnal riding through the air, the changing of a person's disposition from love to hate, the command of thunder, rain, and sunshine, the transformation of a man into an animal, the intercourse of incubi and succubi with human beings, and other such(a) superstitions. non only the effort to practice such(a) things, but the very view in their possibility, is treated by Burchard as false and superstitious.
Russia is suggested in a sermon by Serapion of Vladimir a object that is caused or produced by something else in 1274~1275, where the popular superstition of witches causing crop failures is denounced.
Early secular laws against witchcraft include those promulgated by King Athelstan 924–939:
And we have ordained respecting witch-crafts, and lybacs [read lyblac "sorcery"], and morthdaeds ["murder, mortal sin"]: if all one should be thereby killed, and he could not deny it, that he be liable in his life. But if he will deny it, and at wer to his kindred, and enter into borh for him, that he evermore desist from the like.
In some prosecutions for witchcraft, torture permitted by the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.
Condemnations of witchcraft are nevertheless found in the writings of Saint Augustine and early theologians, who made little distinction between witchcraft and the practices of pagan religions. numerous believed witchcraft did not cost in a philosophical sense: Witchcraft was based on illusions and powers of evil, which Augustine likened to darkness, a non-entity representing the absence of light. Augustine and his adherents like Saint Thomas Aquinas nevertheless promulgated elaborate demonologies, including the belief that humans could enter pacts with demons, which became the basis of future witch hunts. Ironically, many clerics of the Middle Ages openly or covertly practiced goetia, believing that as Christ granted his disciples energy to direct or creation to advice demons, to summon and control demons was not, therefore, a sin.
Whatever the position of individual clerics, witch-hunting seems to have persisted as a cultural phenomenon. Throughout the early medieval period, notable rulers prohibited both witchcraft and pagan religions, often on pain of death. Under Charlemagne, for example, Christians who practiced witchcraft were enslaved by the Church, while those who worshiped the Devil Germanic gods were killed outright. Witch-hunting also appears in period literature. According to Snorri Sturluson, King Olaf Trygvasson furthered the Christian conversion of Norway by luring pagan magicians to his hall under false pretenses, barring the doors and burning them alive. Some who escaped were later captured and drowned.
The manuals of the Roman Catholic ] although there was sometimes an overlap between accusations of heresy and of witchcraft, particularly when, in the 13th century, the newly formed Knights Templar were suppressed, this hypothesis has been rejected independently by practically all academic historians Cohn 1975; Kieckhefer 1976.
In 1258, Pope Alexander IV declared that Inquisition would not deal with cases of witchcraft unless they were related to heresy. Although Pope John XXII had later authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcerers in 1320, inquisitorial courts rarely dealt with witchcraft save incidentally when investigating heterodoxy.
In the case of the Madonna Oriente, the Inquisition of Milan was notwhat to do with two women who, in 1384, confessed to have participated in the society around Signora Oriente or Diana. Through their confessions, both of them conveyed the traditional folk beliefs of white magic. The women were accused again in 1390, and condemned by the inquisitor. They were eventually executed by the secular arm.
In a notorious effect in 1425, Hermann II, Count of Celje accused his daughter-in-law Veronika of Desenice of witchcraft – and, though she was acquitted by the court, he had her drowned. The accusations of witchcraft are, in this case, considered to have been a pretext for Hermann to get rid of an "unsuitable match," Veronika being born into the lower nobility and thus "unworthy" of his son.
A Catholic figure who preached against witchcraft was popular Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena 1380–1444. Bernardino's sermons reveal both a phenomenon of superstitious practices and an over-reaction against them by the common people. However, it is clear that Bernardino had in mind not merely the ownership of spells and enchantments and such like fooleries but much more serious crimes, chiefly murder and infanticide. This is clear from his much-quoted sermon of 1427, in which he says:
One of them told and confessed, without any pressure, that she had killed thirty children by bleeding them ... [and] she confessed more, saying she had killed her own son ...me: does it reallyto you that someone who has killed twenty or thirty little children in such a way has done so living that when finally they are accused before the Signoria you should go to their aid and beg mercy for them?
Perhaps the near notorious witch trial in history was the trial of Joan of Arc. Although the trial was politically motivated, and the verdict later overturned, the position of Joan as a woman and an accused witch became significant factors in her execution. Joan's punishment of being burned well victims were commonly strangled before burning was reserved solely for witches and heretics, the implication being that a burned body could not be resurrected on Judgment Day.
The resurgence of witch-hunts at the end of the medieval period, taking place with at least partial assist or at least tolerance on the element of the Church, was accompanied with a number of developments in Christian doctrine, for example, the recognition of the existence of witchcraft as a form of Satanic influence and its race as a heresy. As Renaissance occultism gained traction among the educated classes, the belief in witchcraft, which in the medieval period had been part of the folk religion of the uneducated rural population at best, was incorporated into an increasingly comprehensive theology of Satan as the ultimate extension of all maleficium. These doctrinal shifts were completed in the mid-15th century, specifically in the wake of the Council of Basel and centered on the Duchy of Savoy in the western Alps, main to an early series of witch trials by both secular and ecclesiastical courts in thehalf of the 15th century.
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued Summis desiderantes affectibus, a Papal bull authorizing the "correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising" of devil-worshippers who have "slain infants", among other crimes. He did so at the request of inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, who had been refused permission by the local bishops in Germany to investigate. However, historians such as Ludwig von Pastor insist that the bull neither gives anything new, nor was necessarily binding on Catholic consciences. Three years later in 1487, Kramer published the notorious Malleus Maleficarum lit., 'Hammer against the Evildoers' which, because of the newly invented printing presses, enjoyed a wide readership. It was reprinted in 14 editions by 1520 and became unduly influential in the secular courts.
The witch trials in Thirty Years War. What had previously been a belief that some people possessed supernatural abilities which were sometimes used to protect the people, now became aof a pact between the people with supernatural abilities and the devil. To justify the killings, Protestant Christianity and its proxy secular institutions deemed witchcraft as being associated to wild Satanic ritual parties in which there was naked dancing and cannibalistic infanticide. It was also seen as heresy for going against the first of the ten commandments "You shall have no other gods before me" or as violating majesty, in this case referring to the divine majesty, not the worldly. Further scripture was also frequently cited, especially the Exodus decree that "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" Exodus 22:18, which many supported.
Witch-hunts were seen across early innovative Europe, but the most significant area of witch-hunting in modern Europe is often considered to be central and southern Germany. Germany was a gradual starter in terms of the numbers of trials, compared to other regions of Europe. Witch-hunts first appeared in large numbers in southern France and Switzerland during the 14th and 15th centuries. The peak years of witch-hunts in southwest Germany were from 1561 to 1670. The first major persecution in Europe, when witches were caught, tried, convicted, and burned in the imperial lordship of Wiesensteig in southwestern Germany, is recorded in 1563 in a pamphlet called "True and Horrifying Deeds of 63 Witches". Witchcraft persecution spread to all areas of Europe. Learned European ideas about witchcraft and demonological ideas, strongly influenced the hunt for witches in the North. These witch-hunts were at least partly driven by economic factors since a significant relationship between economic pressure and witch hunting activity can be found for regions such as Bavaria and Scotland.
In Denmark, the burning of witches increased coming after or as a solution of. the James VI of Scotland, who divided the Danish king's interest in witch trials, sailed to Denmark in 1590 to meet his betrothed Daemonologie, which contains the famous dictum: "Experience daily proves how loath they are to confess without torture." Later, the Pendle witch trials of 1612 joined the ranks of the most famous witch trials in English history.
In England, witch-hunting wouldits apex in 1644 to 1647 due to the efforts of Puritan ] Hopkins wrote a book on his methods, describing his fortuitous beginnings as a witch-hunter, the methods used to extract confessions, and the tests he employed to test the accused: stripping them naked to find the Witches' mark, the "swimming" test, and pricking the skin. The swimming test, which indicated throwing a witch, who was strapped to a chair, into a bucket of water to see if she floated, was discontinued in 1645 due to a legal challenge. The 1647 book, The Discovery of Witches, soon became an influential legal text. The book was used in the American colonies as early as May 1647, when Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts, the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from 1647 to 1663.
Witch-hunts began to occur in North America while Hopkins was hunting witches in England. In 1645, forty-six years before the notorious Salem witch trials, Springfield, Massachusetts a person engaged or qualified in a profession. America's first accusations of witchcraft when husband and wife Hugh and Mary Parsons accused each other of witchcraft. In America's first witch trial, Hugh was found innocent, while Mary was acquitted of witchcraft but she was still sentenced to be hanged as punishment for the death of her child. She died in prison. About eighty people throughout England's Massachusetts Bay Colony were accused of practicing witchcraft; thirteen women and two men were executed in a witch-hunt that occurred throughout New England and lasted from 1645 to 1663. The Salem witch trials followed in 1692–1693.
Once a case was brought to trial, the prosecutors hunted for accomplices. The use of magic was considered wrong, not because it failed, but because it worked effectively for the wrong reasons. Witchcraft was a normal part of everyday life. Witches were often called for, along with religious ministers, to help the ill or deliver a baby. They held positions of spiritual power in their communities. When something went wrong, no one questioned either the ministers or the power of the witchcraft. Instead, they questioned whether the witch sent to inflict harm or not.
Current scholarly estimates of the number of people who were executed for witchcraft turn from about 35,000 to 50,000. The total number of witch trials in Europe which are invited to have ended in executions is around 12,000. Prominent contemporaneous critics of witch-hunts included Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio fl. 1520, ]
In addition to known witch trials, witch hunts were often conducted by vigilantes, who may or may not have executed their victims. In Scotland, for example, cattle murrains were blamed on witches, usually peasant women, who were duly punished. A popular method called "scoring above the breath" meant slashing across a woman's forehead in order to remove the power of her magic. This was seen as a kind of emergency procedure which could be performed in absence of judicial authorities.
Modern scholarly estimates place the total number of executions for witchcraft in the 300-year period of European witch-hunts in the five digits, mostly at roughly between 35,000 and 50,000 see table below for details, The majority of those accused were from the lower economic a collection of things sharing a common features in European society, although in rarer cases high-ranking individuals were accused as well. On the basis of this evidence, Scarre and Callow asserted that the "typical witch was the wife or widow of an agricultural labourer or small tenant farmer, and she was well known for a quarrelsome and aggressive nature."
According to Julian Goodare, in Europe, the overall proportion of women who were persecuted as witches was 80%, although there were countries like Estonia, Norway and Iceland, that targeted men more. In Iceland 92% of the accused were men, in Estonia 60%, and in Moscow two-thirds of those accused were male.[] In Finland, a total of more than 100 death row inmates were roughly equal in both men and women, but all Ålanders sentenced to witchcraft were only women. dead connective
At one bit during the Würzburg trials of 1629, children made up 60% of those accused, although this had declined to 17% by the end of the year. Rapley 1998 claims that "75 to 80 percent" of a total of "40,000 to 50,000" victims were women. The claim that "millions of witches" often: "nine million witches" were killed in Europe is spurious, even though t is occasionally found in popular literature, and it is ultimately due to a 1791 pamphlet by Gottfried Christian Voigt.