the salem witch trials

No

No. Belief in witches is a blaming system. A way people explain personal failure or bad things in general. Individuals are assigned that status by others looking for an explanation and a scapegoat for events. In a culture that belives in witchcraft no individual freely claims that status.

The only person who puts much credence in the theory that the subjects of the witch persecutions were actually "witches" of some sort is Carlo Ginzberg, and I don't think even he holds to the views he published in the late 1960s. Even Russell recanted his faith in Margaret Murray's theories in the 1990s.

Of course there were witches!

... and there are still witches today... they have only changed a bit.

In the 17th century the witches used magic and flew. There magic ability was to make people sick.

In the 20th century the witches wanted a government controlled economy and helped the poor. They magically made people read bad books and accept unamerican ideas.

Now the witches have dark skin and go to mosques. They have the strange ability to take over airplanes with nail clippers and plastic cutlery.

Things haven't changed that much, have they?

An interesting book to read as a companion piece to the whole notion of witchcraft is Eve's Herbs, a scholarly treatment of natural birth control. Women long had knowledge of herbs which were used as abortafacients to control their fertility. Couple this with women's traditional oversight of birth and death and you have the grounding for persecution of witches.

I personally lean toward the witchcraft persecutions as attempts by the Catholic and Evangelical churches to assert control, and that any sort of "Folk Religion Survival" had nothing to do with them. That is merely my opinion. Anne Jacobsen Schutte wrote a marvelous book (whose name I cannot recall) about semi heretial activity in 16th and 17th century Venice that is useful also in understanding the witch persecutions.

Should be:

Anne Jacobson Schutte: Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618-1750. Baltimore/London, Johns Hopkins U.P., 2001.

Thanks Walter. Its an excellent book. Make that 17th and 18th centuries.

Good topic for the season of Halloween. I don't know very much about the subject, but I do know a bit about modern day Salem, MA. It's a quaint town that has built a tourist market on the witch trials of lore. There are witch shops and palm readers, museums and restaurants devoted to the theme. It's also the home of the House of Seven Gables. And, if you ask a witch in Salem if there are witches, s/he'd say "yes, of course".

??? How did you come to that conclusion??? At the time the Catholic church was outlawed in MA. Anyone who even identifed themselves as being a Catholic would have been strung up for that reason alone.

Sorry, I was referring to the witch trials in Europe. We appeared to have wondered onto the general topic of witch trials and away from the specifics of the MA Colony experiences.

Ah! Ok!

personally i perfer a witch and a six-pack on a cold winter night in front of a fireplace, on a sheepskin rug. (nekid of course)

Nakedidity is laudable in all its forms . . .

Don't suck on that witche's tit, though, you're tongue'll stick to the nipple . . .

Actually, more exception should be taken to the use of the word Evangelical . . . such churches really hadn't appeared yet. However, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation were an awful bloody stew: makes China's Cultural Revolution look tame by comparison.

That's a good read, POM--Protestant propagandists of the 16th and 17th century succeeded in forever tarring the Inquisition as a bloody, murderous organization. In fact, the Inquisition was less likely to execute than most governments of the day. Records in Spain show that many people convicted or likely to be convicted in royal courts, attempted to avoid incarceration in royal prisons by making public, heretical statements. They preferred, if they were going down anyway, to end up in Inquisition prisons, which were much more humane, and actually fed the inmates--in other prisons, they'd eat only if friends or relatives brought food, bribing the guards, or brought money (bribing the guards once again) to use to purchase food from the turnkeys at larcenous prices.

While all of that was going on, Protestants were gleefully burning men and women as witches (mostly women, and mostly middle-aged or elderly) right and left. But they used the printing press effectively, and left the impression that the Inquisition was the big villian of the era. The Inquistion was an ordinary product of its times--witch burning was an hysteria which some historians purport claimed more than 80,000 lives in less than a century. By contrast, the Inquisition executed about 3000 people over a 350 year period. To put it further in perspective, the Terror during the reign of Robspierre in the French Revolution exectuted about 5,000 people in a little less than a year and a half. The revolution in Iran executed people at an even more appalling rate, although exact figures are not available. On many days, more than 100 people were executed in Teheran. No one knows how many women the Taliban executed in soccer stadiums as a public spectacle because they had been found wearing make-up. They also executed drug users publicly, while profiting from the sale of opium and heroin.

If you sort through the available numbers without succumbing to historical stereotypes, the Protestants were much more blood-soaked during the Wars of the Reformation and the century which succeeded them than were the Catholics--not that the Catholics would not have wanted to achieve that efficiency, they just weren't up to the expertise of the Protestants, either in excuses for slaughter, or in publishing propaganda.

Wow, Sentanta, that's interesting. Just finished reading, "Who Killed Kit Marlowe?" and found it atmospheric and frightening.

When I wrote my piece that you responded to, I was thinking of the havoc the Huguenauts (sp?) wreaked on medieval churches in southern France, defacing sculpture and more.

They suffered badly in their turn, POM. But they triumphed eventually. Huguenots (i'm not sure of the spelling either, and too damned lazy to look it up) were expelled by the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV (1685?). They ended up in Holland, Germany, England and were a major part of the early settlement of the Carolinas in America. The district of Spitalfields in London is indirectly named for them. They used their expertise well--many were from middle class backgrounds, and most were craftsmen of some sort. They made the clock making industry of England and Holland preeminent, which eventually lead to significant improvements in navigation. Because of their technological know-how, when they enlisted to fight with the English against Louis XIV, they used their wealth to buy guns, and formed an artillery battalion. They also built a hospital for their own wounded, as well as those Englishmen and Dutch who fought with William III and the Duke of Marlborough. They built this hospital in a large, open space of what was then waste ground in the east of London. It was commonly referred to as the French Hospital, and the area around it the French Hospital fields--Hospital fields, and, finally Spitalfields.

In Germany, the Hohenzollern Elector of Brandenburg, know as the Great Elector, offered assylum to people of any creed driven from their homelands by the Thirty Years War. Later, that offer was extended to Hugenots. They went out into the sand-hill and pine barren wastes of Prussia and made it prosper. During the first world war, disaster was turned aside in East Prussia when General Von Francois made the move on his own iniative to turn south and confront Samsonov's army, leading to the German victory at Tannenberg. The most successful u-boat commander in World War One was Kapitan-Leutnant Lothar von Arnauld de la Perrière--with 194 enemy ships sunk. I'm not saying that this makes them great men, i'm just pointing out how much these refugees contributed to their new homelands.

More than anything else, the great French clockmakers who ended up in London and Amsterdam made a crucial contribution. The development of accurate clocks made precise navigation possible. One can find one's position north or south of the equator with relative ease, with fairly primitive instruments. But placing oneself accurately east or west of any point relies upon a comparison of local time to local time at that point. The observatory at Greenwich uses solar observation to establish accurate local time. On board ship, a navigational chronometer is kept set to that local time in Greenwich. When the sun rises, the navigator determines how far south or north the vessel is, consults an alamanac to determine at what time of day the sun will rise at that lattitude on that date, and by comparing the time difference between the local clock and the Greenwhich based chronometer, they can state with a good deal of accuracy the distance east or west of Greenwich for that vessel. The French Protestant refugees brought with them those skills necessary for the English and Dutch to develop clocks of that reliability, leading to the explosion in European prosperity which resulted from overseas trade on a vast scale.

The French Protestants -- wrote she, completely ignoring the spelling of Huegoknots and resorting to phonetics -- were also silk weavers and made other significant economic contributions to places where they settled. Gee, we're a long way from witchcraft.