ShortHand: Big Witch Special Part 1 - The European Witch Craze

SPEAKER_1 (0:15)

Belief in Witches dates back for at least 2,000 years. The first mention of witchcraft that we know about was by the ancient Greeks in 330 BC, in the region of Thessaly, which is the classical home of ancient witches, and they were the first to mention them. Socrates mentions the Thessalian Enchantresses, who bring down the moon from heaven at risk of their own perdition. The Romans had witches too, and there were even a few mentions of them in the Bible. The Old Testament features the story of the witch of Endor, who advised King Saul before battle in the first book of Samuel. And the book of Exodus features the infamous command, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

For thousands of years, witches have been known as individual sorcerers who used their powers for specific purposes. They can affect the weather. People might visit them for spells to increase their wealth, or concoct a love potion to attract a prospective lover, or sometimes to commune with the spirits of the recently dead.

SPEAKER_2 (1:17)

Mostly, the tricks of witches belonged to the everyday and had little effect on the rest of the world. But in the 16th and 17th century, Europe was gripped by a new idea.

Witches became more than local soothsayers. They were part of an organized demonic network in league with the devil himself, a negative supernatural force directly opposed to the kingdom of heaven, one that threatened to cloud the whole world in evil and condemned all people to eternal suffering and hell. So yeah, they're going big. The witches, they're not just fucking about with a bad crop, bad harvest in a small town. They're like, all of you going to hell.

SPEAKER_1 (1:58)

Yeah, well, they're going political is what they're doing.

SPEAKER_2 (2:01)

So this was a centuries long war waged by kings, popes and the greatest thinkers of the time against the prince of darkness himself. To stop the march of evil, more than 200,000 people were executed across Europe for the crime of witchcraft.

Most of Europe's suspected witches were violently tortured for days on end to extract confessions and expose more dark agents across the continent.

SPEAKER_1 (2:28)

I was listening to a podcast about witches the other day.

And obviously, like in Western tradition, the idea of a witch that's like haggard old crone, and it's all to do with fertility. Because after menopause, women are useless to society. So then they become these wise women. And that's why our idea of witches is always old and haggard.

SPEAKER_2 (2:44)

That's interesting. I guess there's so many theories, I'm sure, that we'll get into as to why the witch hunts across Europe happened. I'll save it for then.

SPEAKER_1 (2:53)

Good, because we're getting ahead of ourselves. Here is this week's ShortHand for you, part one. First, it's important to say that this isn't a case of people believing weird shit in the pasto times. Christianity, which had taken root across Europe, saw itself as the great civiliser of nations. And for a while, it had no time for old pagan superstitions. It just nicked all of their holidays, so no one killed themselves in the winter. In the ninth century, the Pope released the canon Episcopi, which set in stone the church's renunciation of witches and all of their powers. And for centuries, the church's top brass were spreading the word that pre-existing pagan beliefs, including werewolves, pixies, folk healing, and witchcraft were unchristian and even heretical.

And this all continued into the 11th and 12th centuries.

But in just 200 years, the position was completely reversed, and the Pope himself sent a decree encouraging witch hunters to tackle this new demonic menace.

SPEAKER_2 (3:55)

How? Well, in the 14th century, things were not pretty. Can you imagine living through a deadly pandemic, a raging war over disputed land, and intolerance and introversion spreading everywhere? Yeah, okay, well, us too. But this was way worse. The Black Death had wiped out between 30 and 60 percent of the whole population of Europe, and the Hundred Years War hadn't helped. And it all resulted in a huge demographic shift, newly multiracial societies and sensitive borders between different communities.

And that led to Inquisitions. Hooray, and those were Christian movements through every corner of the continent working to suppress heresy.

South of the Pyrenees, the Spanish Inquisition chose Jewish and North African immigrants as its scapegoats of social nonconformity. There, they believed that the Black Death had been the result of Jewish people poisoning the wells, and hundreds were burned. But the rest of Christian Europe chose the witch.

SPEAKER_1 (5:00)

In the late 15th century, a Dominican friar called Henrik Kramer wanted to go and hunt witches in the Rhineland.