Witch hunts were very rare in the Middle Ages because the Church didn't believe in witchcraft...

Witch hunts were very rare in the Middle Ages because the Church didn't believe in witchcraft. What changed in the Early Modern Period to make the Church accept the existence of witchcraft and led to all of the 16-17th century witch hunts?

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The Church didn't change its positions at all.

It was just weak as fuck outside of the major cities during the middle ages.

Witches.

"Witchhunts" were generally just an excuse to eliminate polytheists. The Catholic Church had a general policy of tolerating other religions so long as they didn't try to start something, so it rarely authorized witch-hunts. Protestants were far less tolerant in that regard.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Mary's powers were believed to effectively curtail those of the devil. But Protestants entirely dismissed reverence for Mary while reformed Catholics diminished her importance. Devotion to Mary often became indicative of evil. In the Canary islands, Aldonca de Vargas was reported to the Inquisition after she smiled at hearing mention of the Virgin Mary. Inquisitors distorted an image of the Virgin Mary into a device of torture, covering the front side of a statue of Mary with sharp knives and nails. Levers would move the arms of the statue crushing the victim against the knives and nails.

i read somewhere alain danielou i believe, said witch hunts were attacks on a still practised cult of dionysus same info was gotten from the book the witch cult in western europe. can anyone verify

Once the "Malleus Maleficarum" was released in 1487, witch hunting had a solid theological and judicial foundation. The book spread rapidly, especially in academic circles. Paracelsus and Martin Luther are only two academicians that vehemently believed in the existence of witches, and when Maximilian I (who was very sceptical) inquired about the existence of witches, he received a long scientific essay, proving that they were, in fact, real and dangerous.

The church also wasn't as involved in witch hunting as many people believe. Most prosecutors were ordinary people, and your average witch trial didn't involve much interference form the church, that really had no chance to argue against what was now the common academical standpoint. Not to mention the fact that most reformists came form the academic milieu and actively supported witch trials.

Iron maidens didn't exist user, it's a fictional torture device "invented" during the 17th century

There's gotta be a special circle in hell for this.

The book that served as the manual for understanding and persecuting witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, describes how witches were known to "collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest..." The manual recounts a story of a man who, having lost his penis, went to a witch to have it restored:

She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to a parish priest.

Nope. That's a big load of nonsense invented to justify neopagan claims that most neopagans don't even bother with anymore.

There's zero evidence that witch's were 'polytheists.' Even the testimony of confessed witches had nothing to do with any prechristian European religion.

The CLOSEST you get to this is in Salem, where the first trial was influenced by Voodoo.

Can you support this claim? I was directly told by my history professor that most witchhunts were targeted at polytheists. And he certainly was not a "neo-pagan."

There is literally zero basis for those claims.

The Canon Episcopi, a Church law which first appeared in 906, decreed that belief in witchcraft was heretical.

The belief in magic was still so prevalent in the fourteenth century that the Council of Chartres ordered anathema to be pronounced against sorcerers each Sunday in every church.

The Church began authorizing frightening portrayals of the devil in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Images of a witch riding a broom first appeared in 1280. Thirteenth century art also depicted the devil's pact in which demons would steal children and in which parents themselves would deliver their children to the devil. The Church now portrayed witches with the same images so frequently used to characterize heretics: "...a small clandestine society engaged in anti-human practices, including infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality and orgiastic sex..."

Most witch hunts were targeted at perfectly ordinary people. Sometimes they were motivated by greed, sometimes superstition and some people simply wanted to see a rival dead. These things often happened at a grassroots level.

There was no large-scale attacks on polytheist beliefs (what are those even supposed to be), since Christianity had been so deeply engrained into the European population at that time. There were no polytheists, just the odd ritual born from superstition, that had been warped by hundreds of years of Christianity.

its not about polytheism, i am talking about the horned god dionysus, and all the ecstatic and fertility gods that can be found in many religions like apis in egypt. in the dionysiac coven there was 1 male representing the god itself with 12 maenads, seems very similar to what christfaggs called a witch coven. The rites could have survived until the medieval its not far fetched

The problem is that witch hunts happened all over Europe, there is no way that dionysian cults could have spread all the way to Russia. Not to mention the fact that there were some regions in which mainly males were persecuted.

Not every witch hunt also involves these stereotypical covens. Very often the accusations centre around singular persons, that are visited by a devil, fly away on a a broom or other household utensils, and mate with the demon. Coincidentally, similar visions are often the result of belladonna poisoning, an ingredient that was often used in ointments back then.

>There was no large-scale attacks on polytheist beliefs

Not by the Catholic Church, because it had a policy of tolerance so long as you didn't try to challenge them or start trouble in some way.

This was not true for protestants.

>because the Church didn't believe in witchcraft.

Thomas Aquinas believed in the existence of witches and wrote on the nature of their power.

In general though you have to be kind of cautious when talking about this kind of practice given how poor documentation from that period was until the end of it.

Townships Europe wide could be blaming mental illness or bad luck on witches for all we know.

Protestants.

pardon me but you are wrong, Jarilo is the slavic dionysus
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarilo
just noticed this while cheking his page: Some neopagans identify Jarilo with Dionysus, as they are both gods of fertility, forest, and youth, who die and rise again. Another similarity is his relationship with Persephone, Dionysus's sister, and in some cases lover, who is an underworld goddess just like Morana, Jarilo's wife and sister. They are also both sons of the respective sky deity.

>there is no way that dionysian cults could have spread all the way to Russia.

And remember: Do so without producing a single written record.

Or for that matter, Oral Record.

>it had a policy of tolerance so long as you didn't try to challenge them or start trouble in some way.
How broad or narrow was this definition of tolerance?

Witch hunts were used to burn Protestants

underrated post.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-cult_hypothesis

Fuck off and die LARPers

"Specialists in Europe's Early Modern witchcraft beliefs view the pagan witch-cult theory as pseudohistorical; there is an academic consensus among experts that those accused and executed as witches during the period were not members of any witch religion, whether pre-Christian or Satanic in nature. Critics highlight that the theory rested on a highly selective use of the evidence from the trials, thereby heavily misrepresenting the events and the actions of both the accused and their accusers. Further, they point out that it relied on the erroneous assumption that the claims made by accused witches were truthful and not distorted by coercion and torture. They also note that despite claims that the witch-cult was a pre-Christian survival, there is no evidence of such a pagan witch-cult throughout the intervening Middle Ages."

a wood shortage

Protestantism

Witches