witch hunts
Aug. 6th, 2013 11:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelligrumble grumble grouse grouse grouse. . . .
Read a bit of world-building where a writer was talking about a Dark Ages analog in his world. And then threw in a comment about having latter concepts such as inquisitions -- and witch trials.
Talk about thinking in cliches.
Witchcraft beliefs -- beliefs in evil people who use magic to harm you -- are not a peculiarity of the European witch craze era. They are in fact found in every human culture except certain hunting-and-gathering and modern industrialized European ones, in which "modern" means very recent indeed, as at the end of the nineteenth century there was a case in France where two men stoned to death an old man and defended it on the grounds he had bewitched their cow.
And many, many, many of them had witch hunts. The largest witch hunts on record, with thousands of victims, happened in the Roman Republic. And Kipling had his point when he had the character discuss Mogwli's adoptive parents.
If anything, the Church was a countering influence. Charlemagne propogated laws forbidding people to put people to death on the pretense they were witches. The Spanish Inquisition enforced the rules about evidence, doing much to quell the witch craze in Spain; killing witches, which still sometimes happened, was the pretext for lynchings, and secular authorities who ignored the Inquisition's jurisdiction.
Perhaps the use of actual magic would help quell supersitious nonsense, but without enough world-building, it would be illogical to omit witchcraft beliefs from a world that doesn't have an obvious rip off of Christianity in it.
Read a bit of world-building where a writer was talking about a Dark Ages analog in his world. And then threw in a comment about having latter concepts such as inquisitions -- and witch trials.
Talk about thinking in cliches.
Witchcraft beliefs -- beliefs in evil people who use magic to harm you -- are not a peculiarity of the European witch craze era. They are in fact found in every human culture except certain hunting-and-gathering and modern industrialized European ones, in which "modern" means very recent indeed, as at the end of the nineteenth century there was a case in France where two men stoned to death an old man and defended it on the grounds he had bewitched their cow.
And many, many, many of them had witch hunts. The largest witch hunts on record, with thousands of victims, happened in the Roman Republic. And Kipling had his point when he had the character discuss Mogwli's adoptive parents.
Buldeo said that nothing would be done till he returned, because the village wished him to kill the Jungle Boy first. After that they would dispose of Messua and her husband, and divide their lands and buffaloes among the village. Messua's husband had some remarkably fine buffaloes, too. It was an excellent thing to destroy wizards, Buldeo thought; and people who entertained Wolf-children out of the Jungle were clearly the worst kind of witches.
But, said the charcoal-burners, what would happen if the English heard of it? The English, they had heard, were a perfectly mad people, who would not let honest farmers kill witches in peace.
Why, said Buldeo, the head-man of the village would report that Messua and her husband had died of snake-bite. THAT was all arranged, and the only thing now was to kill the Wolf-child. They did not happen to have seen anything of such a creature?
If anything, the Church was a countering influence. Charlemagne propogated laws forbidding people to put people to death on the pretense they were witches. The Spanish Inquisition enforced the rules about evidence, doing much to quell the witch craze in Spain; killing witches, which still sometimes happened, was the pretext for lynchings, and secular authorities who ignored the Inquisition's jurisdiction.
Perhaps the use of actual magic would help quell supersitious nonsense, but without enough world-building, it would be illogical to omit witchcraft beliefs from a world that doesn't have an obvious rip off of Christianity in it.
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Date: 2013-08-07 05:00 pm (UTC)I like the mention of the Salic Law (that ordered the death penalty for any man who slew a woman on grounds that she was 'a witch or a vampire, and sucked the blood of men'*), and of the Spanish Inquisition's efforts to curtail witch hunting (for more on which please read a book titled The Witches' Advocate which describes the event in question).
There was also the Canon Episcopi which stated that anyone who believed that women could fly off to midnight meetings and work evil by witchcraft was falling into sin by believing such; and any woman who said she was doing it should be given a penance and told to stop uttering such foolishness. And that all happened back a century or so after the fall of the Western Roman Empire!
as at the end of the nineteenth century there was a case in France where two men stoned to death an old man and defended it on the grounds he had bewitched their cow.
I would add that there were some 'witchcraft murders' (killings done by typically mentally unstable people usually to end a curse) in pre-WW2 20th century rural Pennsylvania**; and some in post-WW2 Denmark according to the book Witchcraft and Magic in the 20th century in the series edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark.
Heh, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with writing a fantasy book about an inquisitor who's trying to end a witch hunt in a remote area, much like Salazar along the Pyrenees. Of course there would probably be some real witches around both good and bad, with some of them unobtrusively trying to help him and others trying to get rid of the meddler.
There's so much in the real-life witch hunts that could be used for stories and it's never been touched.
* -- Of course I've still read people arguing that Christianity made the Saxons kill witches after Charlemagne's conquest. After all, the Saxons were pagans, therefor they must love witches, right? (THUD) And the death penalty under Salic Law was done to encourage witch hunting. Even though it ordered your death for witch hunting. Because... I have no earthly idea why.
** -- Much more can be found in Arthur Lewis' book Hex, which covers the murder of a braucher and supposed hexe named Nelson Rehmeyer by some men not in their right minds (well, one was crazy, but charismatic enough to convince two desperate boys to help him). The book is marred by a tone of sneering disdain for the Pennsylvania Dutch and their 'rural superstitions' -- while at the same time the Carina Favato insurance fraud murders were going on in Philadelphia. The latter had Italian witchcraft, poison, murder, and even the Hand of Glory!
Sorry to go on like that.
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Date: 2013-08-07 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-12 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-12 12:23 pm (UTC)If it's the one mentioned here.
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Date: 2013-08-12 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-12 03:04 pm (UTC)