Why were witches burned? The history of the most cruel execution of the Middle Ages. The most famous witches of the Middle Ages (5 photos) What they did with witches in the Middle Ages

7. You are very old

Older women, both married and unmarried, were ideal targets for accusations. Rebecca Nurse was 70 years old, she was disabled - and the neighbors suddenly began to blame her. She went down in history as the oldest woman who, at 71, was convicted and executed as a witch.

8. You are very young

Dorothy Goode was only four years old when she confessed to witchcraft (at the same time her mother was accused and hanged in 1692). Dorothy spent nine months in prison, but was eventually released. However, the girl lost her mind forever.

9. You are a midwife

Writer Joel Soutern put it well:

“Social and marital status, independence, pagan influences, secret knowledge of herbs - everything spoke against midwives. The main thing is that the profession was considered unclean and humiliating, so such women simply had to be in collusion with the Devil. In short, everyone was afraid of midwives.”

10. You are married and have too many children.

Such unnatural fertility is probably the result of black magic. Settle in the neighborhood a couple who can not conceive a child, and they will think that you are stealing their happiness. Because you are a witch.

11. You are married and have only one child (or none at all)

The devil cursed you and rewarded you with infertility. In addition, if your neighbors and their six children have already suffered, then surely those who live near them have also turned to evil.

12. You can be called "weird", "stubborn" or "sassy"

Allow yourself any insolence - and you are likely to be called a witch. During Rachel Clinton's trial, the accusations against her were as follows: “Doesn't she act like an angry, pushy, rude woman? Yes, this is the character of a witch! Doesn't she swear, threaten, get into a fight?"

13. You have a mole, birthmark, or third nipple

All this could be interpreted as a sign of the devil. It could also mean that a dog, cat or snake is attached to the witch to drink her blood. The accused had their entire body hair shaved off to find the mark.

14. There is spoiled butter or milk in your cellar.

At the Salem Trial, defendants were accused of having spoiled dairy products in their cellars. So check the fridge.

15. You had sex outside of marriage.

If this applies to you, you can throw yourself into the blue hellfire. In 1651, Alice Lake of Dorchester was tried as a witch because "she was a harlot and had a child." She was tortured so that she eventually confessed that she had slept with the Devil and the child was his. In the same year she was hanged.

16. You tried to predict the identity of your future husband.

Dreaming of your other half? Are you writing his name in your notebook? Then your actions can be interpreted as witchcraft - which happened to Tituba, a slave from the city of Salem. Tituba invited young girls to find out the names of future husbands and became the first woman in Salem to be accused of witchcraft. But not the last.

17. You broke any rule from the Bible - it means you made a pact with the Devil

The following few rules were to be strictly observed by the Puritans. Violation of any of them could be grounds for accusation of witchcraft.

Strict observance of the Sabbath: you can not kindle a fire, trade, travel - sometimes it was called "new showbread in a holy place", this was punishable by death;

Do not commit adultery;

Do not incline people to other gods by prophecy or dreams;

Don't let yourself be raped;

Do not sow more than one species in a seed field;

Do not touch the pork carcass;

Do not wear clothes made of fabrics of more than one type;

Do not cut your hair in a circle;

Do not braid your hair;

And, of course, not to let the witches live.

If you did at least something from this list, then you can safely be accused of witchcraft. You will probably be hanged, burned, or left to rot in prison for this until you yourself die.

PS. In short, for everything

WITCH

As in many other traditional societies, the belief in the existence of witches in medieval Europe was an integral component of popular culture. People believed that there were women and men who had the magical ability to perform actions that could harm others; cause death or disease, damage crops, livestock and property. Such beliefs were common in Europe in both pagan and Christian times. The ancient Germans and Scandinavians saw in some women soothsayers and seers with supernatural powers. They were wary of them and at the same time they often resorted to their help. However, the assistance of the sorceress was considered reprehensible. The hero of one saga is advised to turn to a sorceress in order to succeed in his business; rejecting this advice, he states, "I don't want the future saga of me to be spoiled."

Nevertheless, according to the monuments of Old Norse literature, noble people, skalds, and commoners also resorted to magic. The Christian clergy taught that the only source of supernatural phenomena is God, and only believers can count on his mercy and intervention. The miracle was justified only to the extent that the saints performed it, for they acted in obedience to the will of God. The faith in witches and the effectiveness of their witchcraft was interpreted by the church of the early Middle Ages as a diabolical suggestion (Canon episcopi, 10th century, included in the Gratian Decree in the 12th century). Nevertheless, beliefs associated with witches (striga, Holda, Diana) stubbornly persisted among the people. People believed that witches were able to take the form of animals and other creatures, fly at night and gather in certain places for their witchcraft gatherings.

K. Ginzburg believes that the stories about witches, their night flights and sabbats were based on ancient mythology, in which the cult of the dead was combined with the cult of fertility; the scientist finds indications of the survivals of these beliefs throughout Europe and connects them with Paleo-Asiatic origins, in particular with shamanism. These myths owned the consciousness of part of the rural population. On the contrary, M. Murray (following J. Fraser), trusting the confessions extorted by judges from women accused of witchcraft, defended the thesis about the reality of secret unions, which supposedly united witches who worshiped the “horned god”; this view has been rejected by modern science. The idea of ​​J. Michelet that the witch was the living embodiment of the protest of medieval women against the tyranny of men does not enjoy support today.

Sorcery, associated with the magical use of the forces and phenomena of nature, was an essential and integral part of the life of an agrarian society. There was no clear dividing line between a good healer, able to heal herbs and other drugs, spells and conspiracies, and an evil sorceress, who could invite misfortune and “spoil”, there was no clear dividing line, and the first could easily be turned into the second in the minds of others. Along with the belief in the existence of witches capable of causing harm, there was a belief in good witches and sorcerers who from time to time come into conflict with insidious witches, protecting the crops, health and property of people. Such, for example, are the Friulian benandanti (literally, "beneficial"), who fell into the con. XVI - early. 17th century in the field of view of the Inquisition.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the church sought to counteract pagan "superstitions" that were expressed in magical actions and formulas and, from its point of view, opposed the will of the individual to divine providence. Nevertheless, in the early Middle Ages, the clergy, condemning such a practice, denied the existence of witches and opposed those peasants who from time to time massacred them. The picture outlined above, in its main features, hardly contains anything characteristic of the medieval West alone. Similar phenomena have been studied by ethnologists on non-European material. However, at a certain historical period, the situation changed radically, and Europe became the arena in which unparalleled witch-hunts unfolded.

In the XIII century. the attitude of theologians to the belief in witches is undergoing a decisive change. Now the clergy recognize the reality of witches, attributing to them the ability to do evil deeds and sorcery (maleficia). These deeds are produced by the witches, according to the teaching of the church, not by their own powers, but by their union with the devil. They enter into an agreement with him, pledging to carry out all his orders and engaging in sexual intercourse with him. The devil is present at the sabbaths - secret gatherings of witches, where all sorts of atrocities are happening. The witches, led by the devil, form, in the eyes of the clergy, a kind of "anti-church", whose rites are church rituals turned inside out. The members of this “anti-church” allegedly indulge in debauchery and perform human sacrifices, making magical potions necessary for witchcraft from the flesh of the babies they killed.

The popular belief in the existence of witches, now supported by the church, was combined with the demonological teachings of theologians, and as a result of this symbiosis, that gloomy ideology arose, which at the end of the Middle Ages served as the justification for the widespread and prolonged persecution of the so-called. witches. It is very symptomatic that demon mania and witch-hunts did not spread in the "dark" early Middle Ages, but at the end of the medieval era. They reach their greatest extent in the 16th-17th centuries, i.e. during the Renaissance and Reformation. It was during this period that the role of the devil increases in theological teaching, preaching and in the public consciousness; this time was marked by a sharp increase in all sorts of collective phobias, in particular the fear of the end of the world, the coming of the Antichrist and the Last Judgment. Heretics, Jews and witches acted as "scapegoats" on which Christians shifted the burden of their own sinfulness and guilt before God.

Accusations of women (and sometimes men) of witchcraft and intercourse with the devil in many respects repeated those accusations that had been brought against adherents of heretical sects in the previous period. But if the number of sectarians and Jews was limited, then anyone could be charged with witchcraft. By sending witches to the stake, groups of Christians, as it were, were temporarily freed from psychological tension. The burning of witches took place in the city square, with a large gathering of people, after which a solemn feast was held for judges and other participants in the massacre (at the expense of property confiscated from the victim or, if it was lacking, at the expense of the community): Christians won a new victory over the devil!

The persecution of witches, which began in the Alpine regions, then spread to a large part of Europe. The source of persecution of witches was often the accusations of neighbors who allegedly suffered from the malicious actions of women suspected of witchcraft. However, the judges were not so much interested in these acts as in whether the accused was in league with the devil, and it was these questions that were the focus of the tribunal. The most cruel tortures were used to obtain an appropriate confession. Often, alleged witches were tested with water: a woman bound hand and foot was thrown into her, and if the water, a pure element, pushed the victim out, then this served as proof of her guilt. Another test consisted in weighing the accused: since they believed in the flights of witches, it was assumed that they weigh less than usual.

A “test with tears” was also used: a passage from the Bible was read to the suspect, and if she did not shed tears, then her connection with the devil was considered proven. The judges saw the justification for the need to use the most severe torture in the fact that the witch was allegedly possessed by an unclean force that prevents the accused from confessing her maleficia; by torturing her body, the judges, they were sure, were fighting to save her soul. The new criminal legislation introduced in a number of European countries in the 16th century classified witchcraft as an “exceptional crime” (crimen exceptum), which completely freed the hands of the judges. In most cases, the torture eventually led to the “confession” of the woman in connection with the devil, after which a sentence was passed that doomed the unfortunate woman to be burned at the stake.

The confession of the accused that she was a witch was a prerequisite for sentencing. Self-proclaimed "specialists" appeared in villages and cities, claiming to be able to accurately recognize a witch by appearance. It was believed that the devil left his "seal" on the witch's body in the form of a birthmark or a point immune to pain. On the body of a suspected witch, all the hair was shaved off and needles were pricked in order to find such points. With special perseverance, the judges asked the accused who, besides her, attended the Sabbaths, after which the persons specified by her, in turn, were arrested and tortured, and thus a “chain reaction” arose, the persecution expanded, covering an increasing number of victims.

The writings of some inquisitors and theologians of the 15th century contributed to the tightening of the persecution of witches. (in particular the treatise of the Dominican theologian Johannes Nieder, 1437), but in particular the papal bull Summis desiderantes (1484) and the treatise The Hammer of the Witches (Malleus maleficanim) by the Dominicans Institoris (Kremer) and Sprenger (1486/87) . The Hammer of the Witches was based on textbooks on the investigation and eradication of heresies and became the main "encyclopedia" of witchcraft, which inquisitors, clerics and judges were guided by in their demonological ideas. The Hammer of the Witches, imbued with extreme anti-feminism, talks about how demons and witches seduce people and encourage them to conclude a pact with the devil, how witches celebrate their sabbats and harm people.

Since that time, for two centuries, a huge stream of demonological literature has not dried up, in which theologians and lawyers in every possible way justify the need for a witch hunt. Among the authors of scientific treatises against witches were such well-known thinkers and writers as, for example, Jean Bodin (1580), one of the creators of the theory of state law, who developed the ideas of tyranny and religious tolerance. The writings that appeared from time to time, in which doubts were expressed and objections were raised against rampant persecution of witches (such is the treatise of the German Jesuit Friedrich Spee, 1631), could not stop or reduce the scope of the persecution.

Relationships between the evil spirit and its servants were modeled after the model of fictitious ties. From ser. 17th century two documents were preserved, drawing up an agreement between a certain Frenchman and the devil; these documents were considered in a Parisian court. In the first of them, compiled, as it is written in it, in the underworld, this man swore allegiance to the prince of darkness, renouncing the Lord and pledging to be a faithful vassal of the devil. Another document signed there confirmed the acceptance by the devil of a new subject and promised him all kinds of earthly blessings for a period of 20 years, after which the sinner would be at his full disposal.

Who were the victims of the witch hunt? Mostly women, but in many cases also men. The prejudice against women, which has long been characteristic of clerics and monastics, who sometimes saw in them an instrument in the hands of the devil, opened the gates for direct hostility. The image of a lonely old woman who is outside the team, and, because of this, inspires him with superstitious suspicions (remember the Baba Yaga of a folk tale), is more a stylization than a reflection of the actual state of affairs, because socially full-fledged neighbors were also accused of witchcraft. Among the so-called. witches were both old and young, and prosperous, and poor. The mayor of a German city, accused of witchcraft (beginning of the 17th century), managed to secretly send a letter from prison to his daughter, in which he writes that, unable to withstand the torture, he was forced to admit the charges against him of maleficia and serving the devil, but pleads with his neighbors not to believe these "revelations".

Accusations of witchcraft were often used to punish political opponents and personal enemies. From the point of view of studying the psychological climate in which the witch hunt unfolded, of particular interest are cases when individual women and girls voluntarily, even before any accusations were brought against them, declared that they were in connection with evil spirits and served her. Apparently, under the influence of widespread ideas about witchcraft, some mentally unstable and prone to fantasies or simply abnormal persons sincerely imagined themselves to be witches: this was obviously one of the perverted ways of self-assertion of persons who were otherwise unremarkable.

A Spanish inquisitor's examination of the trial of girls who confessed to being witches (trial in Zagarramurdi, Basque Country, early 17th century) revealed their innocence, and they were acquitted. In a number of cases, the victims of the trials of witches were women whose young children or grandchildren, having heard the legends about the Sabbath, told that they had participated in it and received gifts from evil spirits. Children were also often made victims of persecution. The persecution of witches did not go on continuously, they flared up, growing to menacing proportions, then faded away. It is extremely difficult to establish a correlation between the course of these processes with other phenomena of spiritual and social life. The intensity of the persecution of witches was different both in different periods and in individual countries. In England, torture was not used, and, accordingly, there were fewer convicted witches.

Witch trials were relatively few in Italy, where the papacy was cautious in this regard. On the contrary, there was rampant persecution of witches in Germany, France and the Netherlands. Witches were persecuted with equal zeal in both Catholic and Protestant countries. It has been suggested that the persecution of witches and heretics seemed to replace each other: the attention of the persecutors and society switched from one to the other from time to time: the search for the internal enemies of Christianity remained unchanged. The reasons for the escalation of the persecution of witches into a pan-European process of great importance both in political and religious, and in socio-psychological respects, remain controversial for historical science.

Some researchers are inclined to sociological explanations: they connect the witch hunt with the stratification of the village in the 16th-17th centuries, the inhabitants of which, who previously provided material assistance to the poor, now refuse them, thereby contributing to their expulsion from the team and provoking them to hostile actions. ; among these marginal elements, according to the point of view of C. Thomas, A. McFarlane and R. Mushamble, the so-called witches appear first of all. But such an interpretation seems to be one-sided, because, as we have seen, accusations of maleficia were brought against persons of very different social status and property status.

Substantiating his folklore theory, K. Ginzburg emphasizes that religious and psychological phenomena cannot be understood by reducing them to socio-economic phenomena. Nevertheless, one can hardly ignore the highly complex socio-economic and political situation that developed in Europe in the 16th-17th centuries. and gave rise to psychological instability, which contributed to the spread of all kinds of fears. The interaction of the original folk belief in the existence of witches with scientific demonology was a meeting of two religious and cultural traditions - folklore and science. But this meeting was in many ways fatal for medieval folk culture.

Using the superstitions of the common people, the church reinterpreted them in such a way that it was able to deal a powerful blow to popular culture, of which magic and myth were part. In the course of the witch-hunt, popular cultural traditions, holidays and customs, towards which the church had shown a certain tolerance in the previous period, were demonized, pushed aside and partially suppressed. It is impossible to establish even an approximate number of victims of the witch hunt. The local archives have not yet been sufficiently studied, moreover, many protocols of interrogations and sentences were set on fire along with their victims. In a number of localities, the persecution of witches reached such a scale that there were almost no women left free from accusations. At times, the persecution of witches took on the character of mass psychoses.

Witch persecution began to wane at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. The reasons for the end of the persecution are also not fully understood. The previous explanation, according to which the "light of the Enlightenment" dispelled the "darkness of the Middle Ages", is hardly satisfactory. Apparently, public opinion has gradually changed. The boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, the possible and the impossible, began to shift. The psychological exhaustion of a society that has been terrorized for so long by the struggle against the devil and his servants, the witches, has set in. One of the distant recurrences of demonomania was the trial of a group of women in Salem (Massachusetts, New England), which took place in 1693. Numerous sects and unions of witches and sorcerers, now loudly declaring themselves, have nothing to do with the witches of the Middle Ages.

Ginzburg K. The image of the coven of witches and its origins // Odyssey. The man of history. 1990. M., 1990. S. 132-146; Gurevich A.Ya. The Medieval World: The Culture of the Silent Majority. M. 1990. S. 308-375: "A witch in the village and before the court"; Shverhoff G. From everyday suspicions to mass persecution. The latest German studies on the history of witchcraft at the beginning of the New Age // Odysseus. Man in history. 1996. M., 1996. S. 306-330.