← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 13659 | Posts: 11 | Started: 2004-05-11
2004-05-11 22:28 | User Profile
I recommend everyone who has either accused Christians, or felt shame as a Christian for witch-hunts, to read this scholarly article written by an examplary "hostile witness": Jenny Gibbons, neo-pagan and a M.A. in Medieval history. This article was published in "Pomegranate, the Journal of Pagan Studies".
It would appear that the witch-hunt phenomena has been exaggerated out of all proportion, a veritable holohoax!
Also, the early Christian Church actively DISCOURAGED and prohibited faith in witches and witchcraft, like this excerpt describes:
[COLOR=Sienna]"Modern research has debunked this theory quite conclusively. Although many stereotypes about witches pre-date Christianity, the lethal crazes of the Great Hunt were actually the child of the "Age of Reason." Lamothe-Langon's forged trials were one of the last stumbling blocks that kept the theory of medieval witch hunting alive, and once these trials are removed, the development of witchcraft stereotypes becomes much clearer. All pre-modern European societies believed in magick. As far as we can tell, all passed laws prohibitting magickal crimes. Pagan Roman law and the earliest Germanic and Celtic law codes all contain edicts that punish people who cast baneful spells. This is only common sense: a society that believes in the power of magick will punish people who abuse that power.
Many of the stereotypes about witches have been with us from pre-Christian times. From the Mediterranean to Ireland, witches were said to fly about at night, drinking blood, killing babies, and devouring human corpses. We know this because many early Christian missionaries encouraged newly converted kingdoms to pass laws protecting men and women from charges of witchcraft -- charges, they said, that were impossible and un-Christian. For example, the 5th century Synod of St. Patrick ruled that "A Christian who believes that there is a vampire in the world, that is to say, a witch, is to be anathematized; whoever lays that reputation upon a living being shall not be received into the Church until he revokes with his own voice the crime that he has committed." A capitulary from Saxony (775-790 CE) blamed these stereotypes on pagan belief systems: "If anyone, deceived by the Devil, believes after the manner of the Pagans that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and if on this account he burns [the alleged witch]... he shall be punished by capital sentence."
In the Middle Ages, the laws on magick remained virtually unchanged. Harmful magick was punished, and the lethal trials we know of tended to occur when a noble felt that he or she had been bewitched. The Church also forbade magick and assigned relatively mild penalties to convicted witches. For instance, the Confessional of Egbert (England, 950-1000 CE) said that "If a woman works witchcraft and enchantment and [uses] magical philters, she shall fast [on bread and water] for twelve months.... If she kills anyone by her philters, she shall fast for seven years.""[/COLOR]
So a huge chunk of responsibility for those few deaths that actually happened falls upon pagan superstitions as well.
Many of you may have heard about the famous witch-hunting manual "Malleus Maleficarum", but how many of you knows just what kind of "peer review" it got from other prelates?
[COLOR=Sienna]"In the 1970's, when feminist and Neo-Pagan authors turned their attention to the witch trials, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) was the only manual readily available in translation. Authors naively assumed that the book painted an accurate picture of how the Inquisition tried witches. Heinrich Kramer, the text's demented author, was held up as a typical inquisitor. His rather stunning sexual preoccupations were presented as the Church's "official" position on witchcraft. Actually the Inquisition immediately rejected the legal procedures Kramer recommended and censured the inquisitor himself just a few years after the Malleus was published. Secular courts, not inquisitorial ones, resorted to the Malleus."[/COLOR]
And on the actual casualty figures, hugely exaggerated by anti-Christian polemicists:
[COLOR=Sienna] [COLOR=Black]"From Nine Million to Forty Thousand
"The most dramatic changes in our vision of the Great Hunt centered on the death toll. Back before trial surveys were available, estimates of the death toll were almost 100% pure speculation. The only thing our literary evidence told us was that a lot of witches died. Witch hunting propaganda talked about thousands and thousands of executions. Literature focused on crazes, the largest and most sensational trials around. But we had no idea how accurate the literary evidence was, or how common trials actually were. So early death toll estimates, which ranged from several hundred thousand up to a high of nine million, were simply people trying to guess how much "a lot" of witches was."
...
"To date, less than 15,000 definite executions have been discovered in all of Europe and America combined. (If you would like a table of the recorded and estimated death tolls throughout Europe, and a full list of the sources for these figures, send me a note at [email]jennyg@compuserve.com[/email].) Even though many records are missing, it is now clear that death tolls higher than 100,000 are not believable."[/COLOR][/COLOR]
Here you can read the entire article:
[url]http://www.cog.org/witch_hunt.html[/url]
[COLOR=Blue] [SIZE=4]Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt [/SIZE]
by Jenny Gibbons
Jenny Gibbons has an M.A. in medieval history and minored in the history of the Great Hunt. This article originally appeared in issue #5 of the Pomegranate (Lammas, 1998). [/COLOR]
Petr
2004-05-12 01:11 | User Profile
Although there were real abuses and excesses, the Inquisition in general has gotten a bad rap. The infamous Spanish Inquisition, for example, executed only 3000 people over a period of 400 years. For comparison, Texas has executed 320 people in the last 25 years. I realize that many Protestants have no love lost for the Catholic Church, but everyone needs to realize that attacks on medieval Christianity are just a blunt instrument to paint all Christian faith as fanatical superstition.
2004-05-12 10:57 | User Profile
Interesting, but let's not be [I]too [/I] quick to let the holy men off the hook.
If you accept
"Christian missionaries encouraged newly converted kingdoms to pass laws protecting men and women from charges of witchcraft -- charges, they said, that were impossible and un-Christian"
as true - and here I wonder if these 'laws' were passed to protect only Christians from these charges - then
"The Church also forbade magick and assigned relatively mild penalties to convicted witches. For instance, the Confessional of Egbert (England, 950-1000 CE) said that "If a woman works witchcraft and enchantment and [uses] magical philters, she shall fast [on bread and water] for twelve months.... If she kills anyone by her philters, she shall fast for seven years.""
indicates that, in just a few hundred years, the Church had begun recognizing - and punishing - the existence of witchcraft. Why would you "forbid" that which is "impossible"?
The 'mild' penalties tie into Quantrill's comment - an unintentionally-deceptive focus only on body counts. Since the vast majority of people, then and now, would sooner 'confess' under torture than have it continue, or join that 'mere' 3000 people, it's safe to assume that many more than that 3000 were tortured short of death before conceding whatever was sought of them.
Additional points: I myself have never heard a figure as grotesquely large as 9 million cited. (I would think 100, 000 or so is entirely sufficient to qualify as a chapter in history we're better off having behind us.) And this article doesn't really address the Protestant witch hunts of colonial America, a different-though-similar phenomenon.
(And the li'l devil in me can't help but wonder what Petr's reaction would've been had I begun one of my usual God-hatin' screeds by citing the work of a neo-pagan feminist as a source. They're "cheap anti-religious punks" with worthless degrees until one of them provides fodder for a pro-Christian argument, even if unwittingly; at which point they become sage scholars worthy of note.)
2004-05-12 12:58 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno] The 'mild' penalties tie into Quantrill's comment - an unintentionally-deceptive focus only on body counts. Since the vast majority of people, then and now, would sooner 'confess' under torture than have it continue, or join that 'mere' 3000 people, it's safe to assume that many more than that 3000 were tortured short of death before conceding whatever was sought of them. [/QUOTE] This is, of course, true. Many more people were tortured short of death, than were actually killed. However, since torture was quite common by secular governments in those days, as well, I fail to see why the Inquisition is singled out for particular odium. That was my point.
2004-05-12 18:21 | User Profile
[COLOR=Red]- “indicates that, in just a few hundred years, the Church had begun recognizing - and punishing - the existence of witchcraft. Why would you "forbid" that which is "impossible"?”[/COLOR]
Simple: according to Protestant point of view, the Roman Catholic Church sank into many un-Biblical, quasi-pagan errors in its doctrine during the Middle Ages, making the Reformation necessary. In the early Middle Ages, the Church was still following more Biblical practises.
Besides, you should realize how all-compassing the concept of “witchcraft” was in the Middle Ages. For instance, dealing with poisons and drugs was usually connected with sorceries (in the New Testament, the Greek word for “sorcery”, PHARMAKEIA, is where we get the word “pharmacy” from). Even today, Voodoo priests are known to be expert poisoners.
So, killing someone by “witchcraft” could easily mean simply “poisoning someone”.
[COLOR=Red] - “Additional points: I myself have never heard a figure as grotesquely large as 9 million cited.”[/COLOR]
Well, you are not Christian apologist and therefore you have never had to deal with insane accusations like these. Low-rent skeptics have thrown this crap on us ever since the 18th century Endarkenment.
But none other than your idol, NeoNietzsche, tried to quote even more insane statistics by one Plaisted in our debate in Phora Forum, here:
[COLOR=Blue]http://www.thephora.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5902&perpage=15&pagenumber=4[/COLOR]
NN quoting Plaisted:
[COLOR=SeaGreen]“Adding up the figures that either have multiple sources of support or seem reasonably well documented, gives 20 million killed in the Holy Land and surrounding areas during the crusades, 1 million Waldenses, 1 million Albigenses, at least 18 million witches and others killed during steady state persecutions of heretics in Europe from 1100 to 1600, …”[/COLOR]
And NN even tried to defend Plaisted after I called attention to these absurdities, showing his own utter blind biasedness:
[COLOR=Sienna]“This is why I put my own sense of the number at approximately one million to very conservatively suggest the order of magnitude. The historians figures are all over the place. I chose Plaisted's contribution because he supports the historical material with fundamental demogaphic analysis, as do holocaust revisionists in order to bring larger perspective to the issue of losses, and because Plaisted seemed not to have an anti-Church agenda.
References to "credible modern scholars" do not impress me in regard to such controversies, since the very same element insists upon 5-6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.”[/COLOR]
[COLOR=Red]- “And this article doesn't really address the Protestant witch hunts of colonial America, a different-though-similar phenomenon.”[/COLOR]
The number of those burned by Puritans was quite negligible, and this “witch-burning” canard was largely made up by liberal New England elites to degrade and belittle White Puritan Christians, much like “lynchings” are constantly thrown in the face of White Southerners. Michael Hoffman II has written much about this slandering of Puritan heritage, here’s an example: [COLOR=Blue] “Those Misunderstood Puritans”
[url]http://www.hoffman-info.com/puritan1.html[/url][/COLOR]
[COLOR=Red]- “(And the li'l devil in me can't help but wonder what Petr's reaction would've been had I begun one of my usual God-hatin' screeds by citing the work of a neo-pagan feminist as a source. They're "cheap anti-religious punks" with worthless degrees until one of them provides fodder for a pro-Christian argument, even if unwittingly; at which point they become sage scholars worthy of note.)”[/COLOR]
No intention to be overtly offensive, but are you this “slow”? Do you know what the concept of “hostile witness” means? This neo-pagan scholar Gibbons cannot be accused of pro-Christian bias, making her statements all the more credible, whereas that non-entity that you quoted can be very easily accused of anti-Christian bias.
Moreover, this woman is M.A. in medieval history, which is exactly the subject she was commenting upon. Your “punk” had no formal training in biology or history, the subjects that HE was blabbing about.
Jenny Gibbons was also not immediately caught with gross errors, like your guy was when he claimed that the Catholic Encyclopedia didn’t claim Mendel.
Plus everyone with normal IQ would immediately see how much more professional and scholarly style Gibbons had, compared to amateurish polemics of your guy.
You should learn the art of doing some decent sourcework.
Petr
2004-05-12 18:28 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]Why would you "forbid" that which is "impossible"? [/QUOTE]
Easy enough. If someone tries to, say, conjure Demons and does not succeed, it still proves he is a Sociopath and should be dealt with.
If not, tell me a good reason why a sane, socially responsible person would try to conjure a Demon.
2004-05-12 18:32 | User Profile
[I]"If a woman works witchcraft and enchantment and [uses] magical philters, she shall fast [on bread and water] for twelve months.... If she kills anyone by her philters, she shall fast for seven years.""[/I]
This refers to trying and [I]succeeding[/I], doesn't it?
2004-05-12 18:40 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno][I]"If a woman works witchcraft and enchantment and [uses] magical philters, she shall fast [on bread and water] for twelve months.... If she kills anyone by her philters, she shall fast for seven years.""[/I]
This refers to trying and [I]succeeding[/I], doesn't it?[/QUOTE]
Dunno. "Witchcraft and Enchantment" may refer to ritual doings causing scandal (sex orgies?), but otherwise no real world result. "Magical Philters" may well have been potions for abortion. One thing Witches were definitely accused of is being into abortion.
2004-05-12 19:43 | User Profile
[QUOTE]No intention to be overtly offensive, but are you this “slow”? [/QUOTE]
I dunno - are you?
[QUOTE][I]This neo-pagan scholar Gibbons cannot be accused of pro-Christian bias, making her statements all the more credible...[/I]
They're "cheap anti-religious punks" with worthless degrees until one of them provides fodder for a pro-Christian argument, [B]even if unwittingly[/B]...[/QUOTE]
Perhaps you ought to look twice at what you're attacking - or don't you understand what "unwittingly" means?
2004-05-12 20:03 | User Profile
Poor Illy, is this the only thing in my post that you can nitpick about?
To use some modern Internet slang, "you got pwn3d".
Petr
2004-05-12 20:05 | User Profile
What's it like high-fiving yourself?
You 'caught' me in a error I never made. I think we're [I]all [/I] aware, Petr, that if I'd made the same quibbling inconsequential error regarding [I]your[/I] post, you'd have hired a hall and a brass band.