Witchcraft #

People have practised witchcraft as early as Egyptian and Roman times.

In the book of laws he compiled toward the end of the ninth century, King Alfred outlawed wiccan among the people of England, on pain of death. From its first appearance in English, the word “witch” has referred to a person not merely magical but actively abhorred by state power. (JOSEPHINE LIVINGSTONE)

Early Christians persecuted many innocent people who rejected their beliefs for sorcery; as wizards, warlocks or witches.

The first recorded victim was Hypatia, a Greek mathematician, astronomer, inventor, and philosopher in Egypt, then a part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy. She was murdered by a Christian mob in 415 AD.

The first full account a pact with the devil dates from 1435 in a printed book on witchcraft detailing many of their rituals as inverse parodies of the Catholic church.

In 1484 Catholic priest, Heinrich Kramer, began prosecuting alleged witches in the Tyrol region. He was one of the first to be granted a Papal Bull to do so. His book, the Hammer of the Witches was published in 1487.

A fool-proof trial by ordeal for witchcraft was to tie their hands and throw them into a body of water. If they floated and survived, they were obviously bewitched and burnt at the stake. If they drowned, they were clearly innocent and so went straight to heaven.

Witchcraft was well-accepted in **King James I’**s time. He too, published a book on it and firmly believed he was a target.

He believed that witches had attempted to kill him on a trip to Denmark as well as his newly wed. Six Danish witches were tried and executed. When they finally arrived back in Scotland, Agnes Sampson confessed that she and a coven of witches had conspired against him. Under torture she confessed horrible crimes of using a cat to conjure evil spirits against the King and Queen and that the only thing that saved him was his strong Christian faith. Agnes was tried, convicted, garrotted and burned in a public display in the presence of the King. Witches were commonly considered to be the embodiment of evil and the audience would have been aware of the King’s reputation as a man for whom the devil had a healthy respect.

That the play was probably written in the wake of the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which broadened earlier laws to include the penalty of death, as well as around the time of the thwarted Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up Parliament (1605), suggests that on this occasion (and for the rest of the century) the diabolic forces are to be identified specifically with the Catholic threat to Protestant England.

The pressures of war, along with the paranoia about one’s enemies, created a fertile ground for witch-hunting to flourish. .. . In England, for example, during the civil war conflicts in the 1640s between the king and Parliament, a young man in his twenties named Matthew Hopkins, calling himself the Witchfinder General, blazed through the east of England in strongly Puritan areas, accusing supposed witches of a pact with the devil even without evidence of maleficium. By the time he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven in 1647 he was responsible for hanging upward of three hundred women, according to some estimates more than the total of the previous century and a half – around 40 percent of all the witches ever executed in England.

Due to Miller’s play The Crucible, this ancient word has lately bubbled up from the mud of time into American culture. “Witch” now resonates among two sharply different sets of people: Young, often queer women, who see the witch as an appealingly transgressive and charismatic archetype, and President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly described his critics as the perpetrators of a “witch hunt.” JOSEPHINE LIVINGSTONE

Last witch hanged - The Telegraph - London #

Europe’s last executed witch, beheaded in 1782, after she confessed under torture to conversing with the devil and poisoning the daughter of the house, was finally exonerated and her name cleared in 2008.

Campaigners claim she was the victim of a conspiracy between the Swiss eastern town’s judicial and Protestant church authorities.

Anna Goeldi was employed by the family of a rich married politician, who after having an affair with her, denounced her for witchcraft claiming she made his daughter spit pins and suffer convulsions.

She insisted on her innocence but confessed after being strung up by her thumbs with stones tied to her feet.

The case was brought to light through a book by local journalist Walter Hauser, who claimed Goeldi’s employer had used his influence to convict her after she threatened to make their relationship public.

She was executed even though the law at the time did not impose the death penalty for nonlethal poisoning, it added.

Goeldi’s torture and execution was even more incomprehensible as it happened in the Age of Enlightenment when “those who made the judgment regarded themselves as educated people,” the government said in a statement.

“In spite of that they tortured an innocent person and had her executed, although it was known to them that the alleged crime was neither doable nor possible and that there was no legal basis for their verdict.”

Anna Goeldi has a museum named after her. The name of the accuser in not worthy of noting.

Salem Massachusetts dedicated a sizable rectangular vacant block of land next to its cemetery. Around the edges sit 19 solitary substantial rocks, each with a simple plague naming the victims with brief notes. The names of the authorities are not worth noting.

How ‘witch-hunts’ and ‘Stockholm syndrome’ became part of political language

It’s hard to sympathise with powerful people hounding out innocents — which is why the Coalition wanted us to know the Robodebt Royal Commission was a political witch-hunt.

Poor Donald Trump wants us to know he’s the victim of a witch-hunt, too.

To be fair, maybe the Coalition and Trump are trading on the good reputation of witches. After all, a 2013 poll found most Americans preferred witches (also cockroaches and haemorrhoids) to politicians.

But much like polls, political terms tell us something about society and language. Words like “witch-hunt” take us on an illustrative - and sometimes illusory — journey through metaphor, semantics and the politics of, believe it or not, professional wrestling.

The Witches of Eastwick … a story by John Updike is a spoof of three single women in a picturesque village have their wishes granted, at a cost, when a mysterious and flamboyant man arrives in their town.