Witch hunt
A witch hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft. Practicing evil spells or incantations was proscribed and punishable in early human civilizations in the Middle East. An intensive period of witch-hunts occurring in Early Modern Europe and to a smaller extent Colonial America, took place from about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Counter Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 60,000 executions. The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century. In other regions, like Africa and Asia, contemporary witch-hunts have been reported from sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea, and official legislation against witchcraft is still found in Saudi Arabia, Cameroon and South Africa today.
In contemporary English, "witch-hunt" metaphorically means an investigation that is usually conducted with much publicity, supposedly to uncover subversive activity, disloyalty, and so on, but with the real purpose of harming opponents. It can also involve elements of moral panic, as well as mass hysteria.
Anthropological causes
The wide distribution of the practice of witch hunts in geographically and culturally separated societies since the 1960s has triggered interest in the anthropological background of this behaviour. The belief in magic and divination, and attempts to use magic to influence personal well-being are universal across human cultures.Belief in witchcraft has been shown to have similarities in societies throughout the world. It presents a framework to explain the occurrence of otherwise random misfortunes such as sickness or death, and the witch sorcerer provides an image of evil. Reports on indigenous practices in the Americas, Asia and Africa collected during the early modern Age of Exploration have been taken to suggest that not just the belief in witchcraft but also the periodic outbreak of witch-hunts are a human cultural universal.
One study finds that witchcraft beliefs are associated with antisocial attitudes: lower levels of trust, charitable giving and group participation. Another study finds that income shocks lead to a large increase in the murder of "witches" in Tanzania.
Silvia Federici posits this expanding violence against women as stemming from dispossession of land and female autonomy. A clear separation from mystical mythologies. She names it as both as a historical phenomenon, as well as one that continues today as capitalism and privatization spreads into the global south.
History
Ancient Near East
Punishment for malevolent magic is addressed in the earliest law codes which were preserved, in both ancient Egypt and Babylonia, where it played a conspicuous part. The Code of Hammurabi prescribes thatThe Hebrew Bible condemns sorcery. Deuteronomy 18:10–12 states: "No one shall be found among you who makes a son or daughter pass through fire, who practices divination, or is a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or one that casts spells, or who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead. For whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord"; and Exodus 22:18 prescribes: "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". Tales like that of 1 Samuel 28, reporting how Saul "hath cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land", suggest that in practice sorcery could at least lead to exile, and the Hebrew verb הכרית, translated in the King James Version as "cut off", can also be translated as "kill wholesale" or "exterminate"..
In the Judaean Second Temple period, Rabbi Simeon ben Shetach in the 1st century BC is reported to have sentenced to death eighty women who had been charged with witchcraft on a single day in Ascalon. Later the women's relatives took revenge by bringing false witnesses against Simeon's son and causing him to be executed in turn.
Ancient Greco-Roman world
No laws concerning magic survive from Classical Athens. However, cases concerning the harmful effects of pharmaka – an ambiguous term that might mean "poison", "medicine", or "magical drug" – do survive, especially those where the drug caused injury or death. Antiphon's speech "Against the Stepmother for Poisoning" tells of the case of a woman accused of plotting to murder her husband with a pharmakon; a slave had previously been executed for the crime, but the son of the victim claimed that the death had been arranged by his stepmother. The most detailed account of a trial for witchcraft in Classical Greece is the story of Theoris of Lemnos, who was executed along with her children some time before 338 BC, supposedly for casting incantations and using harmful drugs.During the pagan era of ancient Rome, there were laws against harmful magic. According to Pliny, the 5th century BC laws of the Twelve Tables laid down penalties for uttering harmful incantations and for stealing the fruitfulness of someone else's crops by magic. The only recorded trial involving this law was that of Gaius Furius Cresimus.
The Classical Latin word veneficium meant both poisoning and causing harm by magic, although ancient people would not have distinguished between the two. In 331 BC, a deadly epidemic hit Rome and at least 170 women were executed for causing it by veneficium. In 184–180 BC, another epidemic hit Italy, and about 5,000 people were brought to trial and executed for veneficium. If the reports are accurate, writes Hutton, "then the Republican Romans hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world".
Under the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis of 81 BC, killing by veneficium carried the death penalty. This law banned the trading and possession of harmful drugs and poisons, possession of magical books and other occult paraphernalia. Emperor Augustus strengthened laws to curb these practices, for instance in 31 BC, by burning over 2,000 magical books in Rome, except for certain portions of the hallowed Sibylline Books. While Tiberius Claudius was emperor, 85 women and 45 men accused of sorcery were executed. By the 3rd century AD, the Lex Cornelia had begun to be used more broadly against other kinds of magic deemed harmful. The magicians were to be burnt at the stake.
Persecution of witches continued in the Roman Empire until the late 4th century AD and abated only after the introduction of Christianity as the Roman state religion in the 390s.
Middle Ages
Christianisation in the Early Middle Ages
The German author Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan argued in History of the Witchcraft Trials that the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, murdered by a mob in 415 AD for threatening the influence of Cyril of Alexandria, may have been, in effect, the first famous "witch" to be punished by Christian authorities. Cyril's alleged role in her murder, however, was already controversial among contemporary sources, and the surviving primary account by Socrates Scholasticus makes no mention of religious motivations.The 6th century AD Getica of Jordanes records a persecution and expulsion of witches among the Goths in a mythical account of the origin of the Huns. The ancient fabled King Filimer is said to have
The Councils of Elvira, Ancyra, and Trullo imposed certain ecclesiastical penances for devil-worship. This mild approach represented the view of the Church for many centuries. The general desire of the Catholic Church's clergy to check fanaticism about witchcraft and necromancy is shown in the decrees of the Council of Paderborn, which, in 785 AD, explicitly outlawed condemning people as witches and condemned to death anyone who burnt a witch. The Lombard code of 643 AD states:
This conforms to the teachings of the Canon Episcopi of circa 900 AD, which, stated that witchcraft did not exist and that to teach that it was a reality was, itself, false and heterodox teaching. Other examples include an Irish synod in 800 AD, and a sermon by Agobard of Lyon.
King Kálmán of Hungary, in Decree 57 of his First Legislative Book, banned witch-hunting because he said, "witches do not exist". The "Decretum" of Burchard, Bishop of Worms, and especially its 19th book, often known separately as the "Corrector", is another work of great importance. Burchard was writing against the superstitious belief in magical potions, for instance, that may produce impotence or abortion. These were also condemned by several Church Fathers. But he altogether rejected the possibility of many of the alleged powers with which witches were popularly credited. Such, for example, were nocturnal riding through the air, the changing of a person's disposition from love to hate, the control of thunder, rain, and sunshine, the transformation of a man into an animal, the intercourse of incubi and succubi with human beings, and other such superstitions. Not only the attempt to practice such things, but the very belief in their possibility, is treated by Burchard as false and superstitious.
Pope Gregory VII, in 1080, wrote to King Harald III of Denmark forbidding witches to be put to death upon being suspected of having caused storms or failure of crops or pestilence. There were many such efforts to prevent unjust treatment of innocent people. On many occasions, ecclesiastics who spoke with authority did their best to disabuse the people of their superstitious belief in witchcraft. A comparable situation in Russia is suggested in a sermon by Serapion of Vladimir, where the popular superstition of witches causing crop failures is denounced.
Condemnations of witchcraft are nevertheless found in the writings of Augustine of Hippo and early theologians, who made little distinction between witchcraft and the practices of pagan religions. Many believed witchcraft did not exist in a philosophical sense: Witchcraft was based on illusions and powers of evil, which Augustine likened to darkness, a non-entity representing the absence of light. Augustine and his adherents like Saint Thomas Aquinas nevertheless promulgated elaborate demonologies, including the belief that humans could enter pacts with demons, which became the basis of future witch hunts. Ironically, many clerics of the Middle Ages openly or covertly practiced goetia, believing that as Christ granted his disciples power to command demons, to summon and control demons was not, therefore, a sin.
Whatever the position of individual clerics, witch-hunting seems to have persisted as a cultural phenomenon. Throughout the early medieval period, notable rulers prohibited both witchcraft and pagan religions, often on pain of death. Under Charlemagne, for example, Christians who practiced witchcraft were enslaved by the Church, while those who worshiped the Devil were killed outright. Witch-hunting also appears in period literature. According to Snorri Sturluson, King Olaf Trygvasson furthered the Christian conversion of Norway by luring pagan magicians to his hall under false pretenses, barring the doors and burning them alive. Some who escaped were later captured and drowned.
Early secular laws against witchcraft include those promulgated by King Athelstan :
In some prosecutions for witchcraft, torture apparently took place. However, Pope Nicholas I, prohibited the use of torture altogether, and a similar decree may be found in the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.