The Da Vinci Hoax (8)

The Errors -Secular History

The Witch-hunts

Dan Brown presents the Church as misogynist and violently so. As New Testament scholar, Margaret M. Mitchell, puts it, "Brown propagates the full-dress conspiracy theory for Vatican suppression of women" ("Cracking the Da Vinci Code," Sightings, Sept. 2003). In this vein he propagates the common feminist accusation that the Church's misogyny resulted in the infamous witch-hunts. "During three hundred years of witch-hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women" (p. 125). "The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum - or The Witches Hammer - indoctrinated the world to 'the dangers of freethinking women' and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed 'witches' by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any woman 'suspiciously attuned to the natural world." Oh, and midwives too.

1. Jenny Gibbons is a self-professed Wiccan and extensive researcher on the European witch-craze (which she calls "the Great Hunt"). In her excellent essay, "Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt" she points out that while, "for years, the responsibility for the Great Hunt has been dumped on the Catholic Church's door-step…we know that there is absolutely no evidence to support this theory. When the Church was at the height of its power (11-14th centuries) very few witches died. Persecutions did not reach epidemic levels until after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position as Europe's indisputable moral authority."

2. Gibbons informs us that modern scholarship has found that while Church courts tried many witches they usually imposed non-lethal penalties. A witch might be excommunicated, given penance, or imprisoned, but she was rarely killed. The Inquisition almost invariably pardoned any witch who confessed and repented. The vast majority of witches were actually condemned to death by the secular courts, the worst being local courts. State courts killed about 30% of those accused while "'community-based' courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused witches," says Gibbons. These flourished where central authority had broken down - for example in the loose and rival confederacies of Germany (where an estimated 26,000 died) and Switzerland, and in England during its Civil War. "The worst panics definitely hit where both Church and State were weak."

3. In countries like Italy, Ireland and Spain, "where the Catholic Church and its Inquisition reigned virtually unquestioned", witch trials were rare. In all Ireland only four were ever executed. An initial investigation by representatives of the Spanish Inquisition came to the conclusion that persons claiming to be witches were deluded and the whole thing a product of groundless hysteria. La Suprema (the ruling body of the Spanish Inquisition) responded by issuing an "Edict of Silence" forbidding all discussion of witchcraft, for "There were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about."

4. What of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum,? Because it is the only manual readily available in translations authors have naively assumed that the book painted an accurate picture of how the Church tried witches. "Heinrich Kramer, the text's demented author," Gibbons informs us, "was held up as a typical inquisitor. His rather stunning sexual preoccupations were presented as the Church's 'official' position on witchcraft. Actually the Inquisition immediately rejected the legal procedures Kramer recommended and censured the inquisitor himself just a few years after the Malleus was published. Secular courts, not inquisitorial ones, resorted to the Malleus."

5. As for it being a persecution of freethinking women followers of ancient pagan beliefs, Gibbons notes that "there was no such thing as an 'average' witch: there was no characteristic that the majority of witches shared, in all times and places." Those accused "had nothing in common except having been accused: not age, sex, religion or wealth." She goes on to say that misogyny does not explain the trial patterns. Overall, 75%-80% of those accused were women. However this percentage varied dramatically. In several of the Scandinavian countries, equal numbers of men and women were accused. In Iceland over 90% of the executed were men. "Trials clustered around borders - are borders more misogynist than interior regions? Ireland killed four witches, Scotland a couple thousand - are the Scots that much more sexist?" Gibbons concludes: "The diversity of witches is one of the strongest arguments against the theory that the Great Hunt was a deliberate pogrom aimed at a specific group of people. If that were true, then most witches would have something in common." As for midwives, D. Harley demonstrated in his article "Historians as demonologists: the myth of the midwife-witch" (in Social History of Medicine 3 (1990), pp. 1-26.) that being a licensed midwife actually decreased a woman's changes of being charged.

6. Oxford historian and expert on the witch-craze, Robbin Briggs (Witches and Neighbors: the Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, 1996) found that most of the witch trials took place between 1550 - 1630 and in France, Switzerland and Germany. He could find no evidence that any person executed for witchcraft was ever accused of specifically practicing a pagan religion. He estimated the number of men killed for witchcraft at about 20-25% of the total. In northern and eastern Europe the male proportion could rise to 90% (as in Finland). Briggs found persons of any age or either sex could be accused and executed. Rather than age or sex, Briggs thinks a common factor in those accused was a bad attitude. The quarrelsome, spiteful, aggressive individual who stood apart from the rest of the community most often attracted suspicion. As Briggs notes, "At any one time a particular community probably had a small group of suspects, to whom misfortune could be credited" (p. 28). Gibbons too observes, "many were poor or elderly; many seem to be unmarried. Most were alienated from their neighbors, or seen as "different" and disliked. But there is no evidence that one group was targeted. While the courts were male many women participated in the witch-craze as accusers, witnesses, and sometimes as examiners (e.g. prickers). Christina Larner states it succinctly that early modern witchcraft accusations while "sex-related, were not sex-specific" (Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief, 1996).

7. As for the total number of people executed in the four centuries that witch-craze occurred, it was nowhere near 5 million. Jenny Gibbons notes that "to date less than 15,000 definite executions have been discovered in all of Europe and America combined. Even though many records are missing scholarly calculations now put a maximum at 40,000 - 60,000."

8. While the execution of even a single innocent human being is a terrible thing, Father William Slattery reminds us (The Da Vinci Code: Truth or Hoax, 2004, CD) that one must not be so quick as to condemn an entire religion or age for the witch-hunts. Especially when one remembers that the first secular state in history, the French Republic, executed as many if not more in just nine months (c. 17,000 executed with trial; 12,000 - 40,000 without trial) during its infamous "Reign of Terror" than the witch-hunts did in 400 years! And in the last century "atheistic, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian Nazi and communist regimes murdered more Jews, Christians and other peoples than in all the ages of religious history put together." It is commonly estimated that 12 million people, half them Jews, died in Nazi concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War. Stephane Courtois, in The Black Book of Communism, estimates the death toll under atheistic communist regimes at between 85 and 100 million. Rudolph Rummel, in Death By Government, puts total communist-inflicted deaths at 110,198,000. Former US Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski (Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, 1993) put the number of "lives deliberately extinguished by politically motivated carnage" (i.e. for secular reasons) in the 20th century at 167 million to 175 million. David Barrett, in the World Christian Encyclopedia, 2001, estimates the number of Christian martyrs in the 20th century at 45.5 million.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17