Were there any people persecuted for witchcraft that were actually attempting to practice it?
>>807888
Of course.
Most of them, actually.
>>807888
Depending on what you mean by witchcraft. In those days, sneezing the wrong would be met with cries of witchery.
Puritans were no fun at all.
Maybe. Considering they would have all grown up in heavily Christian cultures though, it's unlikely.
Confessions are pretty much worthless considering so many of them were tortured out of people.
>>807888
In our western world that is more and more atheistic, there are still people into esoteric shit.
Imagine in a world where religion is considered a big deal by most, and where conversations and informations about esoterism are spread frequently.
>>807929
These days people aren't (generally) brought up to be terrified of the supernatural and of witchcraft. I'd say self-proclaimed witches and magic practitioners are a lot more common these days than in early modern Europe.
>>807933
Yes, that's true.
>>807888
Lots of them were witches.
But you have to realize that witchcraft as it was back then bore little resemblance to the Hollywood vision of someone chanting spells out of some blasphemous grimoire to summon the Devil.
Rather, a witch was basically anyone who purported to be able to produce a supernatural effect through any means aside from Christian prayer. Pre-Christian pagan and local folkloric rituals remained in practice in the rural parts of Europe throughout the medieval era and into the renaissance, and all of it was witchcraft in the eyes of the authorities.
>>807917
Being an Irish Catholic women who couldn't speak English was witchery.
Look up Ann Glover.
The Inquisition put a few thousands of women to trial for witchcraft.
Think not a single one were found guilty of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_witch_trials
>>807917
This. Don't like someone? Accuse them of witchcraft and have them burned!
>>809485
Lol XD I love that play. Miller is mah boiiiiiii!
>>807924
What's fucked up is the people who turned themselves in for witchery. Like, why would you do that? Fame?
>>809580
Schizophrenia?
heard that a lot of witch accusations in the early colonies were aimed at widowed women who owned a lot of land due to inheritance, which was frowned upon by town elders (due to being womyn and land = power)
could just be feminist revisionism though.
>>809580
It's probably from the same birth as speaking in tongues.
>>809580
Guilty people do seek redemption, you know. And if not redemption, then punishment. Russian wrote a book about it, iirc.
Besides, wasn't witchshit practiced pretty regularly along with christian practices, well late into the 18th century in the countryside.
>>807888
When you actually look at the cases, for "Witch" read "still secretly a Catholic after the Reformation". Most witch trials happened on borders between Catholic and Protestant controlled areas or areas undergoing significant social strife.
Witch hysteria only really starts to come about in the 16th century. Prior to then, magic was such a common, everyday aspect of life, that people were writing magic words and incantations in blank sections of their prayers books.
So far I have found exactly one example of a specifically identified witch being executed in medieval England and even then, her crime was treason, not the witchcraft itself.
>>809790
It wasn't that persecuting witches was necessarily a cover for rooting out crypto-catholics, or crypto-protestants. After all, neither side was shy about their hatred for the other, so they had no reason to go through the charade. It was more that a sort of religious hysteria spread as old patterns of religious practice were uprooted.
>>809618
when you look at the puritan colonies, you generally find that a lot of them were simply batshit insane, no ulterior motive needed. Men were often just as likely to be charged with witchcraft as women. It all came down to the fact that, like any good cult, the puritans cultivated a sense of persecution. Of course, in the temporal world this was somewhat justified, but puritans were the sort to add a religious aspect to everything. So the king isn't persecuting you because of politics at court, he's doing it because the devil told him to.
So partly the witch trials grew out of the sense of spiritual persecution - when you're sure Satan is out to get you, you start seeing his spies around every corner. And partly out of the tendency to turn everyday problems into spiritual problems. So in a sense the feminists have a point, in that if a village councilman was unhappy that his female neighbour had more land than him he might call her a witch, but this was simply a small facet of a more general cultural practice.
>>809834
Just to put things into perspective, the ideas about Satan directly influencing events haven't ceased till today and there is quite a few conspiracy theories centering around that.
Some people have even taken it so far to accuse the Devil himself of starting the witch trial, the Puritans themselves being innocent and mislead by his tricks.
>>809834
It's worth noting, that the religious persecution the Pilgrims were fleeing, is that the English government was TOO tolerant and DIDN'T persecute non-Puritans enough for their liking.
>>810161
Really?
Sauce?
Believing in witchcraft was the crime, not doing magic or whatever. Stop getting your history from Underworld or what the fuck ever deals with witches or something.
>>809790
>No papist whore could possibly be a witch.
>>807888
Sort of. The problem is what counts as heresy to you is the norm for someone else, so lots of people were killed for performing rituals that they personally would not have thought to be "evil" but to the catholic peasants in the next village over...
>>810219
Le obligatory Poe's law Christian.
>>810257
>implying it's not the other way around
>they have secret meetings, drink blood and eat human flesh and pray to statues
>must be witches, burn them!
>>810258
Le Ignorance is Bliss poster.
>>810273
>Protestants unironically believe this
>>807888
Along the lines of OP's question, I would like to take this moment to remind /his/ that there were in actual historical fact, party-member communists working in Hollywood.
>>810298
I like how the lack of evidence is the proof their was a cover up
>>807888
Probably, yes. Most documents we have are nothing but judicial texts or modern age intellectual's thoughts of it. Whether members of the state, of the church or of their local's inteligentsia, they were not able to produce a true believer' account.
However, by the time's evolving concept of what was witchcraft, there was probably a factual basis for their claims. Probably not the sabbath, the flight or the international conspiration, but the pacts of desperation, the superstition and the belief in the relation with extrahuman entities. Those were frightening times, there was a tradition of resorting to a town's magician of sorts and they were an easy target after reformation made cristianity all about purging itself of heterodoxy. Jews, lepers and herectics were also accused of similar things (dance with the devil, conspiration [poisoning the well, anyone?] and orgies). The medieval Merlin had turned into Morgana after the XVth century - and Morgana, a powerful woman, a subversive, wasn't as tollerated at the minds of both the clerics and their followers.
>>810298
>muh 68 million
And I thought the Jews liked exaggerating things...
>>807888
probably, most of them were just people that didn't follow the church though
>>809834
>A well thought out, reasoned and somewhat informative answer
You're doing it wrong. Didn't even blame serbs or turks.
It's okay
They were doing Satanic Ritual Abuse
Oh plenty. Some witch allegations were done against old women, some likely senile. The vast majority of those accused were the poor, disadvantaged women in society such as widows. Though a lot of men were accused too, some with their wives. Witch accusations were used as a tool in communities between factions as well to get the better of others.
The fucking Reformation had a major impact though as it meant that both Catholics and especially Protestants became super paranoid about heresy.
If anyone is interested, take a look at accounts of witchcraft here: http://witching.org/brimstone/
Some are funny, like a kid who threw porridge in a woman's face, calling her a witch.
I think maybe from a modern perspective it's hard to understand why witches were persecuted. For us there has to be some ulterior motive, (land, money, ostracization, etc.). But I was in Ugandan countryside not so long ago and people were genuinely afraid of witchcraft. I was told that children were sometimes kidnapped and sacrificed for rituals where neighbours would curse each other for gain. I'm pretty ignorant on the European equivalent, but "witches" may have really been practicing their craft.
>>811608
>For us there has to be some ulterior motive, (land, money, ostracization, etc.).
>But I was in Ugandan countryside not so long ago and people were genuinely afraid of witchcraft.
I think it really depends on which particular persecutions you're looking at.
For example, in Salem, I do think fear played a much larger part that people usually believe today. There were still Indian tribes attacking settlers and beating them to death in the general Salem area, there were will large forests with wolves and 'savages' and other unknown monsters in them right nearby, there was still sudden sickness and disease and hardly any medical people to speak of, etc. And that's on top of the very strict puritanical religion practiced there. It is very easy for fear and superstition to take root in that sort of atmopshere, and for that fear to drive the witch accusations.
I would imagine in the Ugandan countryside, there is a social atmosphere where the fear of witchcraft would easily take root.
But there are other examples, where people in larger and/or more developed cities and countries were accused, where the motives we can trace from the court records and remaining evidence does seem more personal. Whether it's for gain such as land, or because of a personal spat. Often the accusations go against people who are well known in town for being outspoken or assholish (like an old widow who would have people work on her farm for money, then spend ages paying them back and they always had to take her to court).
>>810215
No wonder it was so easy to throw the accusation around then. Can't prove what someone is thinking if they don't speak their mind
>>810215
This was the case at first, but by the time of the early modern era people actually started believing that witches could carry out real spells.
It's been a while since I read it, but IIRC Malleus Maleficarum includes a chapter explaining why the transformation one undergoes to become a werewolf is an actual physical one, and not illusory.
>>810161
Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the Puritans kicked up a fuss because they thought that the English government was too lenient on Catholics, and some of those who emigrated did so because they thought devilish papism was creeping back into England. No, in the sense that when puritans started making trouble over this, the government's reaction was often to crack down on Puritanism and try to force them into conformity with the Church of England, which caused many to flee the very real threat of imprisonment or execution.
>>807888
I recommend Oxford's Witchcraft Handbook. It has saved my dissertation. I almost went with Robert Mandrou's accounts until I read that Alfred Soman had debunked him like 30 years ago.
I also recommend Stuart Clark's Thinking with Demons. It's enormous, but it's the most brilliant shit I've ever read about this theme. It's like Skinner's Foundations of the Modern Political Thought but about witches and modern intellectuals.
>>810215
It depends on the time and place.
The dominican priests who dennounced it on the Malleus weren't accused of heresy. Jean Bodin, Nicolas Remy and Pierre de Lancre weren't either, at least at first. Catholic church eventually said that witchcraft belief was superstition, but they weren't able to make it a crime by then - for it was too much widespread, even among the Church's ranks. The witch-belief only got debunked when the magical-thought had transfered from a physical dimension (what with spirits everywhere and doing shit like throwing apples from trees into the heads of a pure man) to an immaterial one (well, if there's something like a force, it isn't a spirit, right?; what if spirits are more like above/beyond nature rather than natural?). It has nothing to do with believing in witchcraft being a crime.
