Most people now days think of witches as green, wart-covered hags with a black cat and a flying broom stick. But the true history of the witches is a gruesome and bloody one. Persecuted by religious fanatics, frightened and scared peasants and clergy, and falsely accused by children striking back at their strict elders. Before the worship of male dominated religions and monotheistic religions, there was one called The Old Religion. When Christianity was thought up, many attempts were made to convert to the “new” religion.
The popes at the time built their churches on the site of the old temples to discourage the old worship and encourage the new. They called the old worshipers “pagans” and “heathens” which was somewhat accurate since pagan means people who live in the country and heathen means one who dwells on the heath.
The European Trials were one big spread of mass hysteria. This was fueled by guides to “witch-hunting” mainly called maleficariums. The most famous one was the Malleus Maleficarum written in 1486 by two German monks named Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger. There were many others, but none were more widely published. These books were full of religious propaganda and the beliefs of the authors.
With the panic increasing, people accused anyone they suspected of “non-religious” behavior and those who used supposed magic to heal. They really used herbs and other forms of healing. Over the years in Germany, England, France, Spain, and countries around them, so-called “witches” were burned. Over three centuries nine million people were burned, hung, or otherwise killed, tortured and humiliated.
The Church set up a group of special people to deal with the accusations. These people were called Inquisitors. When people were accused, the magistrates of the cities put them in jail and got the Inquisitors to question them. The so-called “questioners” then proceeded to take the person into their room and tortured them to get a confession, since they couldn’t kill them without a confession.
They tortured them by stripping them naked and either putting pins under their nails, ripping their nails out, putting them on a stretch rack or an iron maiden, pouring scalding hot water on them, putting them on a wheel partially in water and spinning the wheel, using hot rods to burn it out of them and many more disgusting and painful procedures.
They burned so many people that in one German village they burned over 600 people at once, and in another village there were almost no women, children or cats left because they were all killed. They burnt cats because they were thought of being familiars of the Devil and the witches.
This helped bring on the Black Plague because there were no cats to kill the rats who carried the plague. In 1736, an Act was passed that stated since there was no such thing as witchcraft, the people who claimed to have occult powers were to be charged with fraud. This largely killed the witch accusations and the actual members of the Old Religion went into hiding.
The Salem Trials are perhaps the most well known in America. They started on January 20, 1692; with two girls, nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams. They were thrown into convulsive seizures, mysterious fits and trance-like states. Later, more girls began to exhibit similar behavior.
They started the accusations by accusing three women. Tituba, a slave of Elisabeth’s uncle, who was a minister; Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Warrants were immediately issued to bring these women in for questioning. Tituba readily confessed that she was a witch, saying that she had seen the Devil in the shape of a hog and sometimes as a dog.
Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good both maintained that they were innocent. After Osborne, Good, and Tituba were examined; the townspeople began to accuse more people.
Most of the accused were women whose behavior was bad or if they were poor. In March and April, Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Elisabeth Procter, Sarah Cloyce, John Procter, Mary Warren, Bridget Bishop, Abigail Hobbs, Nehemiah Abbott, and many more were accused of being witches.
They were all examined and of all of them only Abigail Hobbs confessed and only Nehemiah Abbott was cleared.
The main examiners were John Hathorne (whose grandson Nathaniel added a w to the last name, making it Hawthorne), Captain Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Corwin, deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, with occasional help from Increase Mather, and his son, Cotton Mather, both of which were ministers and highly intelligent.
The first to die was Sarah Osborne, who died in a Boston prison. The first official death by hanging was Bridget Bishop on June 10, 1692, not as some people think, Sarah Good.
Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes, and Sarah Good were all executed on July 19. When they were on the gallows, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes called Sarah Good to speak and confess, when she replied, “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.”
This was thoroughly chilling to hear, since this was not what was expected out of a dying Christian, but it was expected out of a witch (or a malevolent old woman). The most important victim out of this trial was not Sarah Good, but Rebecca Nurse. No one wanted to believe that she, a good Christian woman, was a witch.
Hathorne’s own sister and her husband even testified that she was not a witch, and Hathorne had doubts while examining her. They even found her not-guilty of witchcraft during the preliminary hearings, but when this verdict was announced, all of the young girls who were being afflicted by witchcraft made a hideous outcry, as if being hurt, to the sheer amazement of the court.
When she was brought before the grand jury, Amber Putnam, Sr., putting on more theatrics, said that the apparition of Nurse, came to her and started to choke her. After this testimony almost everyone in the room decided that the decision of the lower court was the wrong one.
They used a slip of the tongue against Nurse in the final trial. When a fellow prisoner was brought to testify against Nurse, she said, “What, do you bring her? She is one of us,”. The person prosecuting Nurse claimed that this was acknowledgment of her membership in a coven of witches. She really meant that the woman was a fellow prisoner and that she was not legally allowed to testify. But the harm was done. The jury reconsidered the previous verdict and this time convicted Rebecca Nurse of witchcraft.
On July 19, she was executed along with Sarah Good and the other women, and
she was the very model of good Christian behavior. On November 25, 1692, the General Court of the colony of Massachusetts, created the Superior Court to handle the remaining cases of witchcraft. This time no one was convicted. In all, twenty people died in Salem. Thus ended the Salem Witch Hunts.
Since the first witch hunts so long ago, to the last of the Colonial Trials, over ten million people have died or been tortured because of fear of the unknown, hysteria, or wild accusations of children.
Let this be a lesson to people who hate or fear what they think is different or strange. Fear is a disease which can kill millions of people, some even innocent, to keep safe a very few.