The headline read "Paraguay: woman accused of witchcraft burned alive"
A45 year-old indigenous woman was burned alive in Paraguay for witchcraft. this week.
It is nothing new.
Law codes going back to Ancient Egypt and Babylonia have included provisions for witch burning. Even the Code of Hammurabi, sometimes touted as the first modern example of a law code, contained provisions for igniting witches.
More often than not witches were women. Although no one knows how many people have been executed as witches, here's some stats from ancient times.
- 331 BC, 170 women killed (it was in connection with the spread of disease--I guess the hysteria was similar to the Ebola of toad.
- 184 BC, 2,000 alleged witch were killed
- 182–180 BC 3,000 more executions again surrounding an epidemic
Did the Church try and counter the ignorance?
No, they propagated it at various Councils
- 306 Elvira
- 314 Ancyra
- 692 Trullo
- 785 Paderborn
- 794 Frankfurt
The Council of Lombard says, "Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female servant as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be believed by Christian minds."[
Not everyone was pro witch execution. Pope Gregory VII (1080) and King Harald III of Denmark stopped the witch burnings,
Popes were not in agreement. Pope Alexander IV in 1258 said, no to witch investigations but by 1257 Pope John XXII said go ahead, run a good Inquistion.
In 1487 Pope Innocent VIII approved of Malleus Maleficarum available in English on Amazon, which says about the book "
"The Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for "The Hammer of Witches", or "Hexenhammer" in German) is one of the most famous medieval treatises on witches. It was written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, and was first published in Germany in 1487. It was the culmination of a long medieval tradition of treatises on witchcraft, the most famous being the Formicarius by Johannes Nider in 1435-1437. The main purpose of the Malleus was to systematically refute all arguments against the reality of witchcraft, refute those who expressed even the slightest skepticism about its reality, to prove that witches were more often women than men, and to educate magistrates on the procedures that could find them out and convict them. (Quote from wikipedia.org)"
In 1490 the book was banned by the Church.
After a series of witch trials in the 15th and 16th centuries witch burning and trails became less popular. Germany was one of the leaders in freeing the world from witches. The picture at the top of this blog was from 1585 in Baden, Switzerland.
Like all good lawmakers the Witchcraft Act of 1541 in England wrote regulations for witch punishments.
Of course, America can boast about the Salem witch trials, which were caused by malicious teenagers.
Often the witches were old women or women who annoyed someone. Evidence could include turning someone's butter rancid.
A report by the UN Refugee Agency estimates that thousands of people worldwide are accused of being witches every year. The UN says they are often abused, cast out of their families and communities and sometimes killed.
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