Witch Hunts

Not sure if bait. Men were executed for witchcraft as well.

YEEHAW

WEZ FREE FROM THAT GOSHDANG CATHULIK CHURCH

*gasp*

LAWDY LODY

DUH INFALLIBLE BOOK SAY KILL DUH MAGIC WITCHES!!

GIT THAT THUR BOI WITH ASTHMA! HEZ SUMMONING DUH DEVIL!!

Braise Luther

depends...they were less numerous than most people think and while no doubt many innocents were harmed sometimes the "witches" got what they deserved. pic related.

Ergot poisoning and easy way to steal property

>What was the real reason they were done?
After you start paranoia machine witch hunt campaign becomes a tool for regular people to get rid of people they just don't like -- neighbours, competitors, disliked family members

There were a few cases where witch hunt processes started because disgruntled children called their mother a witch.

Witchery is real
desu we need more Demonologists and witchcraft trials to return. Demonologists will study for signs of Satan and the court will hang witches.

Have some old art of witches getting what they deserved

...

...

[spoiler]My personal fave[/spoiler]

...

...

...

...

...

Primitive accumulation and the creation of the working class.

...

...

Demonologist sounds like a pretty cool profession desu

Witches were real, that was the real reason. What is with this recent trend of explaining supernatural phenomena through le secular rational lens?

Most prominant witchrcaft act in britain rarely if ever called for execution, and maximum sentence was usually one year imprisonment.

The witch hunts need to come back

They still exist in south africa.

Anyone who said otherwise than the church or treathened its power in anyway was called an heretic, a witch, etc. And it has wiped out every other form of religion like that. Bye natural paganism. Welcome sheeples.
And now if you want, you can become even more sheeples by taking islam in.no? Too late, your politicians already chose for you.

FUCK RELIGIONS

M'lady

Cut yourself with that edge

You're speaking about the spanish inquisition, most murders were done either by german peasants or by the lowland's inquisition witch were traitor hunts rather than witch hunts

A witch burnt by a Catholic kingdom would have to refused to recant what they did or recant and then keep performing witchcraft.

Protestants just burnt witches and let mob rule and emotions dominate.

Hence why more witches died in protestant lands than Catholic ones.

So protestants weren't pussies like the catholics, got it.

Anatoly Fomenko states that the catholic church was attempting to rid the world of old world knowledge and replace it with their version of history to ensure their control on the western world. His work also states that the dark ages were predominately fabricated and that it coincided with the Muslim expansion which destroyed the final remnants of classical civilization and replaced the Roman Empire with the holy Roman Empire of the Vatican.

Isaac Newton also has writings about his suspicion that the church had made an attempt to revise history.

Generally anyone who was mentally kooky was taken for possessed and/or a witch. Anyone sane recanted under torture and was generally let go after punishment/penance. To be burned, you had to be exceptionally unlucky or so fucking bonkers you couldn't save yourself.

Why were women more likely to be burned at the stake than men? Partly a false view of the past (plenty of men were killed too), partly because being a woman plain fucking sucked. We talk about patriarchy, and I know on Veeky Forums that's a trigger word for /pol/ types, but seriously... medieval Europe was a patriarchy.

Imagine you live amongst a bunch of uneducated superstitious peasants (including your priest) who take Tourette's syndrome or menopausal hot flashes for the mark of the devil. Herbal remedies, astrology and fortune telling and shit were also popular and typically the business of older widowed women.

These, too.

I mean, we have the modern phrase 'witch hunt' for a reason. Even past scholars realized shit was exploited to settle scores.

Lots of people were burned for having heretical books like gnostic texts or hermetic writings and or writing that the church did not like. The age of the inquisition was predominately a hunt for unapproved information.

I don't want to be taken for enabling that identpol shithead but witchtrails were an almost exclusively women centered phenomenon, according to my history teacher.

The inspirational Malleus Maleficarum is apparently oddly packed with "fucking BITCHES" language.

Yea, but how many peasants and urban poor were reading censored material?

It could have been in circulation among merchant classes. Heretical texts are readily mentioned via old church records and have been documented as being burned in mass.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents

Heretical books, the Tor of its day.

>It's not just because of superstition, right? I don't imagine people were that stupid to use that alone as a reason to kill people.

Bluntly, you need to read more. Early modern people were not late modern people. There are still witch hunts in some parts of the world where you can see the mindset in action.
thediplomat.com/2014/10/papua-new-guineas-tragic-witch-hunts/
Witch hunting died out in the West more or less exactly as belief in witchcraft died out among the elite.

There were tons of mass book burnings during the reformation in Europe. Not the only period of mass book burnings but it is significantly massive.

The Catholic Inquisition was set up by the 4th Lateran Council in 1215 A.D. by Pope Gregory 9th to institutionalise what had been going on for years.

Its purpose was to seek out and destroy heretics (the enemy within) pagans (the enemy without), and witches (the hostility to sex and women).

It was handed over in 1232 to the Dominicans (Domini canes "the hounds of the Lord"), the Papal secret police. The Inquisition was dissolved in 1870.

Only in 1982 did the Church admit the inquisition was a "mistake" note: not immoral or wrong.

>the Dominicans (Domini canes "the hounds of the Lord")

Uh, no, that would be because they were founded by one Saint Dominic de Guzman

A farce, mass hysteria plus medieval believes = lots of dead people

I've always wondered what made people so.... cruel? Tying up someone then giving them to the flames while they're screaming and fighting is some grade A sadism. How did people back then manage it? I remember hearing that public executions were also social gathering and we're attended like how we would see a movie

Only ones who refused to recant even at the pyre were burnt alive and from what I recall they were rare, at least for inquisition burnings. Not sure about protestants.

If you begged forgiveness at the last minute then they'd strangle you and just burnt your corpse.

Medieval version of Bread and Games

AFAIK, protestants in Europe love to burn those witches alive. Hell, there were even girls as young as 9 years old that were burnt after testifying against their parents. And no that's not some atheist drivel, it was real and recorded in a German town

It was the secretly Satanist aristocracy controlled establishment purging the occult scene of any white witches and cunning folk who opposed their influence

Most victims were likely not full-fledged witches, as others had said it was a convenient way for a community to rid itself undesirables, but it allowed for the key targets to be reached

Satanic black witches have often forcefully recruited the white witch lines into their fold, sign the Luciferian pact and acknowledge their supremacy or face organized misfortune, but those that successfully resisted had to be taken care of

Much of European history is the conflict between the black and white mages among the old nobility, the successors of the ancient mystery schools and keepers of the esoteric wisdom not fit for profane eyes, the Freemason movement was designed to be a meeting ground between the two, hence the checkerboard floors of the lodges

people don't realize that white witches often held Christian, usually Gnostic beliefs and utilized angels and saints into their workings, the Virgin Mary with her lunar trappings and pagan title as Queen of Heaven was considered a guise of the Goddess, she's the one who crushes the serpent underfoot, dominating the phallic symbol

Satanists are violent misogynists, in their rituals the Horned God takes precedence over the Goddess who must serve him, whereas traditionally it is the Goddess who is the Queen and the Horned God is the Beast who must be domesticated by the harvest mother of agricultural civilization

I've always wondered if the Romanovs were another casualty in this near ancient conflict, it almost seemed like those girls and their brother were being trained by Rasputin for something, they lived such ascetic lifestyles and Merovingian-descended royals have always considered themselves at least royal Davidic Judaeans ruling a Danite elite behind closed doors, if not direct descendants of Christ

How would being burnt at stake felt like? Would die quickly or would you actually burn alive slowly?

depends on how it's done, but iirc you actually die from the smoke inhalation before the flames get to anything vital, it's still excruciatingly painful and your nose might've melted off a bit before you pass out

there was actually a practice of loved ones hanging small pouches of gunpowder around the victims' necks so it would blow their heads off quickly into the process so as to lessen the amount of suffering they have to go through

it was allowed because as long as they went up in that purifying flame, the soul would be cleansed according to the prevailing barbaric beliefs of the time

>What was the real reason they were done?
Same reason a crisis / mass hysteria is used by anyone these days; land/wealth grab and a way to settle grievances without anyone prying to deeply.

>I remember hearing that public executions were also social gathering and we're attended like how we would see a movie
Oh come on stop pretending you wouldn't start attending these things if they started burning people again.

Did she just cum? It's strangely erotic. That girl from Berserk who gets off on seeing people get burned at the stake, now I can somehow understand her.

I would be really interested in knowing how much did eroticism play into all these witch hunts. Because its role is apparent in at least the depictions of it.

Anyone got anything on this?

This might be a good inspiration for an isekai fantasy web novel antagonist.

>live life as a holedigger
>poor as fuck
>poor nutrition has made me short and mottled
>baker's daughter is always nice to me
>now that she's finally 13 and of marrying age I want to ask her to be my wife
>muster up the courage to ask her
>she tells me I need to ask her father
>(feels like she's making excuses desu)
>I ask her father
>he laughs in my face
>tells me to get my holedigging ass out of here
>feel depressed
>dig a few holes to clear my mind
>time for the town meeting
>accuse the baker's daughter of being a witch
>she can't pass the tests that would clear her
>local drunk says he saw her fiddling with herbs
>obviously not true, but who cares
>she's off to the stake
>I go home
>masturbate furiously while I can hear the townspeople cry out of blood
>finish while she's screaming
>go back to digging holes
>fucking bitch should've said yes

I feel like this is ridiculous by also plausible. It begs the question how townspeople would willingly condemn someone they've known their entire life to a violent and gruesome death. It's easy to be barbaric and violent to your enemy when life is cheap, but how could it be so easy towards your neighbor?

>but how could it be so easy towards your neighbor?

>why is she always fucking around with herbs
>weird woman, never going to church
>I think that harlot showed some ankle the other day
>Wait, so if she's gone there's no one in her family anymore and her land's up for grabs?
>I heard someone say she sleeps with the devil himself!
>I've totes seen it with my own eyes, she even hissed at me!

It's all about escalation and undesirables.

The terror that ignorant savages have towards the unknown is amazing.

Look at modern rural africa for example.

I read the log of a missionary who wrote about how even the nicest and most easygoing natives went from kind and hospitable to vitriolic and furiously violent when the subject of witches came up. His own friend would scream for blood

You know, I've been thinking about how burning people is the closest thing people back then have to porn. A screaming young girl tied naked to a stake is hot as fuck, I'd be lying if I won't fap to that.
Such as in this case where the people and artists couldn't find someplace to express eroticism, they'd use naked witch burnings to express it

Eroticism plays a huge part in the witch hunts. The maleficarum is basically a really long rant of a robot about how women manipulate everything and why they should be burnt to expose their parts

You underestimate the things people would do in the name of greed

If those people getting burned are child rapists and the like I wouldn't mind. But most of the time they are burning innocent people

witches have always been highly eroticized, just as the Devil figure is a satyr, the witches who consort with him are as daughters to the nymphs

Pan was always surrounded by lusty women in various states of undress, just as in a Black Mass orgiastic naked witches conjured Satan, both happening deep in the woods

in regards to the witch hunts, it's very hard to imagine that the practice of inquisition and witch-finding wouldn't attract sadists of every stripe

the tests these girls and women were put through are so bizarre and demented they sound like they'd almost belong in a modern fetish dungeon if they weren't so extreme

>the tests these girls and women were put through are so bizarre and demented they sound like they'd almost belong in a modern fetish dungeon if they weren't so extreme
Indeed, they're some of the kinkiest and cruelest torture devices ever made and some are still in use today

If it really happened as exaggerated as that.

You can find some of those instruments in museums. They can't all be 19th century reproductions

Like hell they can't

i don't know much about witchhunts specifically but these types of hysterical persecutions usually involve fantasies of the persecuted group engaging in secret and depraved pleasures. in the case of witches the notion that they have access to some unholy ecstasy via copulating with satan is a big part of the obsession. see also: the trial of the templars and "satanic" scandals in general, all the way to the 80s/90s "satanic ritual abuse" myths, which provided "respectable folk" with a socially acceptable channel for fantasizing about depraved sex and violence. under the guise of a moral outrage the newspapers delivered endless titillating material, lurid speculation about secret blood orgies, incest, child rape etc and people ate it all up.

FUck. I'm hard.

just want to say that I'm a SRA survivor and so are many of my family members and though not every case may have been legit during the "Satanic Panic", that kind of stuff really did/does happen

there's been an organized repression of survivors telling their stories and seeking justice by some really shady types, the founders of the False Memory Foundation or whatever are documented as being pro-pedophilia in the 70's, it's pretty gross

the problem is that the Evangelical Christians made it all about the Satanic aspect, they seemed to be more offended about that than the actual atrocities

the people who commit these crimes use the Satanism thing more as a scare tactic to shock their victims into repressing the memories and make them afraid to come forward, it's more about grooming and programming than anything magical or spiritual

Physical suffering was just more normal. Animal fights were a more common form of entertainment. Slaughter of animals was still part of daily life.

> the "witches" got what they deserved.
You know witches don't actually exist, right?

I used the think of them as an example of Christianity being immoral until I read Mere Christianity.

>“Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the 'Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”

>Generally anyone who was mentally kooky

I don't buy that because when you consider how relatively common mental illness is in people and how rare witch burning were it doesn't really add up.

Life itself was pretty brutal back then. A domino-effect of cruelty. Look at how fucked up people can be just from being fingered by an uncle once or twice when they were 12. Imagine being raped by a stream of knights, seeing your friends and family butchered in vendettas or on some lord's whim, or soldiers from a 50km away pillaging your region to keep YOUR lord from getting richer than him, etc. etc. Death and disease were weekly occurances, too. There was no UN or Red Cross or some shit, personal civil rights were but a glint in some stoned monk's eye still centuries away.

There is a fair amount of documentation to suggest the Crusades for example were a win-win way for the Church and Lords to send 'excess' bored and aggressive knights away so they'd stop roaming their countryside killing and raping (not so different to what happened in Japan with its samurai). I mean, removing Saracens in the Holy Land was a genuine pretext, but pretty convenient too.

Remember, a noble HAD to keep and maintain a certain number of soldiers and knights (mounted soldiers) at all times -- a professional feudal soldier was seldom anything else but a man-at-arms, and warriors need fighting. Left to their devices, that's exactly what they'll seek out.

In this era, some 20-year old Spanish monk, a kissless virgin, sticking hot irons up some ladies vag for confessions of being a witch, which by the way all his superior's told him was right and holy, is hardly surprising.

...

>Hey guys lets talk about something bad related to christianity
>HURR DURR MUH FEDORA

Ban all christcucks

It was done mostly by protestants.

Why is this a "bad thing related to Christianity?" They're not the only group in history to burn witches. This isn't even a question of Christian morality. If witches were real we would be completely justified in burning them, so witch burnings weren't an error in morality but instead an error in facts.

See

Depends on the competence of the executioners. As mentioned, you would likely die of smoke inhalation before being 'burned to death' which actually takes a long time. Fire tends to cook your skin and fat, but you basically have to bake for hours for your vitals to shut down from the heat/flame. Before that could happen, you'd mot likely die of asphyxiation or shock, or blood loss if you were lucky and your skin crispy cracked open at a big juicy artery. It would hurt like fuck at first, but eventually your skin's nerve endings would be destroyed, so it would maybe only feel like intra-muscular aches rather than sharp burning pains.

There are documents of people taking hours to die this way. Most people would 'repent' at some point and kiss a cross on a stick kept nearby, at which point they could be strangled, stabbed or shot.

The Inquisitian was pretty corrupt, but only the repeatedly unrepentant of 'serious' sins were burnt alive. I sorta think it must have been the delusional mentally ill who didn't quite know what was going on, and would've seemed pretty fucking possessed.

There was generally always the option of being strangled (garrotted) first.

The medieval era was not quite as puritanical about nudity as you'd think. Tits were for milking babies and nothing to be overly worried about hiding. It was more about status really. Nobles should generally dress well and appear 'civilized', whereas peasants' nudity was expected and didn't matter, as they were practically animals anyway.

>the closest thing people back then have to porn
>not watching your farm animals walk around with huge dragging donkey dongs

>Be a sadist pervert
>hear about the inquisition
>suddenly gain an interest in learning to read and the church
>work your away up the ranks, sucking off a few Bishop cocks now and then
>finally get your chance to live out all your filthiest fantasies in a rainy grey rape dungeon
>GET PAID FOR DOING IT
>??????
>profit

Oh shut the fuck up. Medieval Europe wasn't like in your funny cartoons where slobbering retards run around with shit forks and torches actively looking for someone to burn.

Despite what you may want to think about the medieval people to be able to jerk off on your superiority, they were people like us, capable of reason and thought. If you pulled any of that shit you'd become the retard of the village overnight. People would laugh at you and you'd become a living joke, the pathetic skinny useless holedigging manlet that tried spreading rumors of a girl that declined him.

You'd probably get chased away from public spaces and kids would run around beating you without anyone coming up for your defense. Maybe they'd kill you, who knows. Poor unattended children can be really mean, you know. Especially if they know they have the moral support of the community.

As for the father, well...he is absolutely going to make it sure that you get your shit pushed in. Most probable course of action would be that he'd find you with his mates and bash your skull in.

It's ridiculous just as it is implausible.

That's not how any of it worked and you should probably kill yourself before writing another greentext.

Not that user, but I have a feminist friend with a degree in history, and her thesis was on witchhunts and all that.

While the actions of the "hunters" were driven more by anti-catholic hysteria than anti-witch or anti-female intentions, the few women who identified themselves as witches occasionally did so because it was one of the few ways in which a woman could control her own sexual expression.

Or something like that, at least. I might have been drunk when we were talking about this. Being a witch meant breaking the norm, and being in charge of yourself instead of "owned" by anyone else, so you could go and be a massive slut or whatever.

Uneducated people tend to act retarded regardless of the time period user. Not sure why you feel the need to defend a bunch of mud farmers from 500 years ago

What are you doing on this board?

that's some bullshit. this idea - that people were hunting witches because they randomly got his mistaken idea that witches scientifically existed, and ceased to hunt witches when science progressed to a post-witch level - completely ignores the psychological reasons for wanting to persecute a (real or imagined) minority. wanting to take out your frustrations on someone that can be hurt without impunity is an irrational impulse that has nothing to do with your level of scientific knowledge - scientific knowledge about the nonexistence of witchcraft would merely ruin the excuse, not remove the impulse (bullying is a little schoolyard witchhunt). christianity is morally culpable here because it provided a framework for arbitrarily marking defenseless people as acceptable targets for mob violence.

i would even find dubious the idea that the people who formed witch-persecuting mobs necessarily all individually believed in witches. mobs are not formed by unanimous belief: the presence of a mob is what enables people to temporarily hold beliefs and express desires that they would not find acceptable in everyday society: for example, the desire to see the pretty neighbor lady you lusted after stripped bare, in pain, ruined, finally punished for never responding to your attention. all within the righteous confines of your faith, the crowd around you making you feel safe. make her spread her legs more, maybe lucifer's putrid seed will drip out.

All these faggots believing that witches were real. If anything, they were set up by jews.

>Ywn never have your own witch torture dungeon
Why live at all?

nope...Catholic Germany killed the shit out of witches:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trier_witch_trials
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulda_witch_trials
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamberg_witch_trials

meanwhile Protestant England and Holland were more mellow.