Ancient Near East Punishment for malevolent
magic is addressed in the earliest
law codes, which were preserved in both ancient
Egypt and
Babylonia, where it played a conspicuous cultural role. The
Code of Hammurabi (18th century BC
short chronology) prescribes that: The
Hebrew Bible condemns sorcery.
Deuteronomy 18:10–12 states: "No one shall be found among you who makes a son or daughter pass through fire, who practices divination, or is a soothsayer, or an
augur, or a
sorcerer, or one that casts spells, or who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead. For whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord"; and
Exodus 22:18 prescribes: "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". Tales like that of
1 Samuel 28, reporting how
Saul "hath cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land", suggest that in practice sorcery could at least lead to exile, and the Hebrew verb , translated in the
King James Version as "cut off", can also be translated as "kill wholesale" or "exterminate".. In the Judaean
Second Temple period, Rabbi
Simeon ben Shetach in the 1st century BC is reported to have sentenced to death eighty women who had been charged with witchcraft on a single day in
Ascalon. Later the women's relatives took revenge by bringing false witnesses against Simeon's son and causing him to be executed in turn.
Ancient Greco-Roman world No laws concerning magic survive from Classical Athens. However, cases concerning the harmful effects of
pharmaka – an ambiguous term that might mean "poison", "medicine", or "magical drug" – do survive, especially those where the drug caused injury or death. , 1792 During the
pagan era of
ancient Rome, there were laws against harmful magic. According to
Pliny, the
5th century BC laws of the
Twelve Tables laid down penalties for uttering harmful incantations and for stealing the fruitfulness of someone else's crops by magic. In 331 BC, a deadly epidemic hit Rome and at least 170 women were executed for causing it by
veneficium. In 184–180 BC, another epidemic hit Italy, and about 5,000 people were brought to trial and executed for
veneficium. While Tiberius Claudius was emperor, 85 women and 45 men accused of sorcery were executed. By the 3rd century AD, the
Lex Cornelia had begun to be used more broadly against other kinds of magic deemed harmful.
Middle Ages Christianisation in the Early Middle Ages The German author Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan argued in
History of the Witchcraft Trials that the philosopher and mathematician
Hypatia, murdered by a mob in 415 AD for threatening the influence of
Cyril of Alexandria, may have been, in effect, the first famous "witch" to be punished by Christian authorities. Cyril's alleged role in her murder, however, was already controversial among contemporary sources, and the surviving primary account by
Socrates Scholasticus makes no mention of religious motivations. The 6th century AD
Getica of
Jordanes records a persecution and expulsion of witches among the
Goths in a mythical account of the origin of the
Huns. The ancient fabled King
Filimer is said to have The Councils of
Elvira (306 AD),
Ancyra (314 AD), and
Trullo (692 AD) imposed certain ecclesiastical penances for devil-worship. This mild approach represented the view of the Church for many centuries. The general desire of the
Catholic Church's clergy to check fanaticism about witchcraft and
necromancy is shown in the decrees of the
Council of Paderborn, which, in 785 AD, explicitly outlawed condemning people as witches and condemned to death anyone who burnt a witch. The Lombard code of 643 AD states: This conforms to the teachings of the
Canon Episcopi of circa 900 AD (alleged to date from 314 AD), which, stated that witchcraft did not exist and that to teach that it was a reality was, itself, false and heterodox teaching. Other examples include an Irish synod in 800 AD, and a sermon by
Agobard of Lyon (810 AD).
King Kálmán (Coloman) of Hungary, in Decree 57 of his First Legislative Book (published in 1100), banned witch-hunting because he said, "witches do not exist". The "Decretum" of
Burchard, Bishop of Worms (about 1020), and especially its 19th book, often known separately as the "Corrector", is another work of great importance. Burchard was writing against the superstitious belief in magical
potions, for instance, that may produce impotence or abortion. These were also condemned by several Church Fathers. But he altogether rejected the possibility of many of the alleged powers with which witches were popularly credited. Such, for example, were nocturnal riding through the air, the changing of a person's disposition from love to hate, the control of thunder, rain, and sunshine, the transformation of a man into an animal, the intercourse of
incubi and
succubi with human beings, and other such superstitions. Not only the attempt to practice such things, but the very belief in their possibility, is treated by Burchard as false and superstitious.
Pope Gregory VII, in 1080, wrote to King
Harald III of Denmark forbidding witches to be put to death upon being suspected of having caused storms or failure of crops or pestilence. There were many such efforts to prevent unjust treatment of innocent people. On many occasions, ecclesiastics who spoke with authority did their best to disabuse the people of their superstitious belief in witchcraft. A comparable situation in
Russia is suggested in a sermon by
Serapion of Vladimir (written in 1274~1275), where the popular superstition of witches causing crop failures is denounced. Condemnations of witchcraft are nevertheless found in the writings of
Augustine of Hippo and early theologians, who made little distinction between witchcraft and the practices of pagan religions. Ironically, many clerics of the Middle Ages openly or covertly practiced
goetia, believing that as Christ granted his disciples power to command demons, to summon and control demons was not, therefore, a sin. Whatever the position of individual clerics, witch-hunting seems to have persisted as a cultural phenomenon. Throughout the early medieval period, notable rulers prohibited both witchcraft and pagan religions, often on pain of death. Under Charlemagne, for example, Christians who practiced witchcraft were enslaved by the Church, while those who worshiped the Devil (Germanic gods) were killed outright. Early secular laws against witchcraft include those promulgated by King
Athelstan (924–939): In some prosecutions for witchcraft, torture (permitted by the
Roman civil law) apparently took place. However,
Pope Nicholas I (866 AD), prohibited the use of torture altogether, and a similar decree may be found in the
Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. Although
Pope John XXII had later authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcerers in 1320, inquisitorial courts rarely dealt with witchcraft save incidentally when investigating heterodoxy. In the case of the
Madonna Oriente, the Inquisition of
Milan was not sure what to do with two women who, in 1384, confessed to have participated in the society around Signora Oriente or
Diana. Through their confessions, both of them conveyed the traditional folk beliefs of white magic. The women were accused again in 1390, and condemned by the inquisitor. They were eventually executed by the secular arm. In a notorious case in 1425,
Hermann II, Count of Celje accused his daughter-in-law
Veronika of Desenice of witchcraft – and, though she was acquitted by the court, he had her murdered by drowning. The accusations of witchcraft are, in this case, considered to have been a pretext for Hermann to get rid of an "unsuitable match," Veronika being born into the lower nobility and thus "unworthy" of his son. A Catholic figure who preached against witchcraft was popular Franciscan preacher
Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444). Bernardino's sermons reveal both a phenomenon of superstitious practices and an over-reaction against them by the common people. However, it is clear that Bernardino had in mind not merely the use of spells and enchantments and such like fooleries but much more serious crimes, chiefly murder and infanticide. This is clear from his much-quoted sermon of 1427, in which he says: One of them told and confessed, without any pressure, that she had killed thirty children by bleeding them ... [and] she confessed more, saying she had killed her own son ... Answer me: does it really seem to you that someone who has killed twenty or thirty little children in such a way has done so well that when finally they are accused before the Signoria you should go to their aid and beg mercy for them? Perhaps the most notorious witch trial in history was the
trial of Joan of Arc. Although the trial was politically motivated, and the verdict later overturned, the position of Joan as a woman and an accused witch became significant factors in her execution. Joan's punishment of being burned alive (victims were usually strangled before burning) was reserved solely for witches and heretics, the implication being that a burned body could not be resurrected on
Judgment Day. However, historians such as
Ludwig von Pastor insist that the bull neither allowed anything new, nor was necessarily binding on Catholic consciences. Three years later in 1487, Kramer published the notorious
Malleus Maleficarum (lit., 'Hammer against the Evildoers') which, because of the newly invented printing presses, enjoyed a wide readership. The book was condemned by top theologians of the
Inquisition at the
Faculty of Cologne for recommending illegal procedures and for being inconsistent with Catholic teaching. Despite this, it was reprinted in 14 editions by 1520 and became unduly influential in the secular courts. In Europe, the witch-hunt craze was negligible in Spain, Poland, and Eastern Europe; conversely, it was intense in Germany, Switzerland, and France.
Early Modern Europe and Colonial America The witch trials in
Early Modern Europe came in waves and then subsided. There were trials in the 15th and early 16th centuries, but then the witch scare went into decline, before becoming a major issue again and peaking in the 17th century, particularly during the
Thirty Years' War. What had previously been a belief that some people possessed supernatural abilities (which were sometimes used to protect the people), now became a sign of a pact between the people with supernatural abilities and the devil. To justify the killings, some
Christians of the time and their proxy secular institutions deemed witchcraft as being associated to wild
Satanic ritual parties in which there was naked dancing and
cannibalistic infanticide. It was also seen as
heresy for going against the first of the
Ten Commandments ("You shall have no other gods before me") or as
violating majesty, in this case referring to the divine majesty, not the worldly. Further scripture was also frequently cited, especially the Exodus decree that "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18), which many supported. (1853), by
T. H. Matteson Witch-hunts were seen across early modern Europe, but the most significant area of witch-hunting in modern Europe is often considered to be central and southern Germany. Germany was a late starter in terms of the numbers of trials, compared to other regions of Europe. Witch-hunts first appeared in large numbers in southern France and Switzerland during the 14th and 15th centuries. The peak years of witch-hunts in southwest Germany were from 1561 to 1670. In the Catalan
Pyrenees during the
Kingdom of Aragon, in 1424 the
Code of Ordinances of the Àneu Valleys were enacted and is the first legal text in Europe that specifically addresses the
persecution of witchcraft and provides insight into medieval legislation related to the phenomenon of witchcraft. The
first major persecution in Europe, when witches were caught, tried, convicted, and burned in the imperial lordship of Wiesensteig in southwestern Germany, is recorded in 1563 in a pamphlet called "True and Horrifying Deeds of 63 Witches". Witchcraft persecution spread to all areas of Europe. Learned European ideas about witchcraft and demonological ideas, strongly influenced the hunt for witches in the North. These witch-hunts were at least partly driven by economic factors since a significant relationship between economic pressure and witch hunting activity can be found for regions such as Bavaria and Scotland. In Denmark, the burning of witches increased following the
reformation of 1536.
Christian IV of Denmark, in particular, encouraged this practice, and hundreds of people were convicted of
witchcraft and burnt. In the district of Finnmark, northern Norway, severe witchcraft trials took place during the period 1600–1692. A memorial of international format,
Steilneset Memorial, has been built to commemorate the victims of the Finnmark witchcraft trials. In England, the
Witchcraft Act 1541 regulated the penalties for witchcraft. In the
North Berwick witch trials in Scotland, over 70 people were
accused of witchcraft on account of bad weather when
James VI of Scotland, who shared the Danish king's interest in witch trials, sailed to Denmark in 1590 to meet his betrothed
Anne of Denmark. According to a widely circulated pamphlet, "Newes from Scotland," James VI personally presided over the torture and execution of
Doctor Fian. Indeed, James published a witch-hunting manual,
Daemonologie, which contains the famous dictum: "Experience daily proves how loath they are to confess without torture." Later, the
Pendle witch trials of 1612 joined the ranks of the most famous witch trials in English history. , where suspected witches were held and interrogated. 1627 engraving.In England, witch-hunting would reach its apex in 1644 to 1647 due to the efforts of Puritan
Matthew Hopkins. Although operating without an official Parliament commission, Hopkins (calling himself Witchfinder General) and his accomplices charged hefty fees to towns during the
English Civil War. Hopkins' witch-hunting spree was brief but significant: 300 convictions and deaths are attributed to his work. Hopkins wrote a book on his methods, describing his fortuitous beginnings as a witch-hunter, the methods used to extract confessions, and the tests he employed to test the accused: stripping them naked to find the
Witches' mark,
the "swimming" test, and
pricking the skin. The swimming test, which included throwing a witch, who was strapped to a chair, into a bucket of water to see if she floated, was discontinued in 1645 due to a legal challenge. The 1647 book,
The Discovery of Witches, soon became an influential legal text. The book was used in the
American colonies as early as May 1647, when
Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in
Massachusetts, the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from 1647 to 1663. About eighty people throughout England's
Massachusetts Bay Colony were accused of practicing witchcraft; thirteen women and two men were executed in a witch-hunt that occurred throughout
New England and lasted from 1645 to 1663. The
Salem witch trials followed in 1692–1693 with 19 victims convicted and given the death penalty. Current scholarly estimates of the number of people who were executed for witchcraft vary from about 35,000 to 60,000. The total number of witch trials in Europe which are known to have ended in executions is around 12,000. Prominent contemporaneous critics of witch-hunts included Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio (fl. 1520),
Johannes Wier (1515–1588),
Reginald Scot (1538–1599),
Cornelius Loos (1546–1595),
Anton Praetorius (1560–1613),
Alonso Salazar y Frías (1564–1636),
Friedrich Spee (1591–1635), and
Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698). Among the largest and most notable of these trials were the
Trier witch trials (1581–1593), the
Fulda witch trials (1603–1606), the
Würzburg witch trial (1626–1631) and the
Bamberg witch trials (1626–1631). In addition to known witch trials, witch hunts were often conducted by vigilantes, who may or may not have executed their victims. In Scotland, for example, cattle murrains were blamed on witches, usually peasant women, who were then punished. A popular method called "scoring above the breath" meant slashing across a woman's forehead in order to remove the power of her magic. This was seen as a kind of emergency procedure which could be performed in absence of judicial authorities. Another important element of the persecution of witches were
denunciations. "In England, most of the accusers and those making written complaints against witches were women." Informers did not have to be revealed to the accused, which was important for the success of the witch trials. In practice, appeals were made to other witnesses to the crimes, so that the first informer was followed by others. In the event of a conviction, the informer sometimes received a third of the accused's assets, but at least 2
guilders. A well-known and well-documented example is the case of
Katharina Kepler, the mother of the astronomer
Johannes Kepler, for being in a pact with the devil and using witchcraft. In 1615, she was called a witch by a female neighbor in the
duchy of Württemberg following a dispute with her of having given her a bitter drink that had made her ill. She was held captive for over a year and threatened with torture, but was finally acquitted thanks to her son's efforts.
Execution statistics (1848) Modern scholarly estimates place the total number of executions for witchcraft in the 300-year period of European witch-hunts in the five digits, mostly at roughly between 35,000 and 60,000 (see table below for details), The majority of those accused were from the lower economic classes in European society, although in rarer cases high-ranking individuals were accused as well. On the basis of this evidence, Scarre and Callow asserted that the "typical witch was the wife or widow of an agricultural labourer or small tenant farmer, and she was well known for a quarrelsome and aggressive nature." According to Julian Goodare, in Europe overall, 80% of those who were persecuted as witches were women, although there were countries and regions like Estonia, Normandy and Iceland, that targeted men more. In Iceland 92% of the accused were men, in Estonia 60%, and in Moscow two-thirds of those accused were male. In Finland, a total of more than 100 death row inmates were roughly equal in both men and women, but all
Ålanders sentenced to witchcraft were only women. At one point during the Würzburg trials of 1629, children made up 60% of those accused, although this had declined to 17% by the end of the year. Rapley (1998) claims that "75 to 80 percent" of a total of "40,000 to 50,000" victims were women. The claim that "millions of witches" (often: "
nine million witches") were killed in Europe is spurious, even though it is occasionally found in popular literature, and it is ultimately due to a 1791 pamphlet by
Gottfried Christian Voigt.
End of European witch-hunts in the 18th century as the incitor. In England and Scotland between 1542 and 1735, a series of
Witchcraft Acts enshrined into law the punishment (often with death, sometimes with
incarceration) of individuals practising or claiming to practice witchcraft and magic. The last executions for witchcraft in England had taken place in 1682, when Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles, and Susanna Edwards were executed at Exeter. In 1711,
Joseph Addison published an article in the highly respected
The Spectator journal (No. 117) criticizing the irrationality and social injustice in treating elderly and feeble women (dubbed "Moll White") as witches.
Jane Wenham was among the last subjects of a typical witch trial in England in 1712, but was pardoned after her conviction and set free.
Janet Horne was executed for witchcraft in Scotland in 1727. The final act, the
Witchcraft Act 1735, led to prosecution for fraud rather than witchcraft since it was no longer believed that the individuals had actual supernatural powers or traffic with
Satan. The 1735 act continued to be used until the 1940s to prosecute individuals such as
spiritualists and
gypsies. The act was finally repealed in 1951. In Denmark, this took place in 1693 with the execution of
Anna Palles and in Norway the last witch execution was of
Johanne Nilsdatter in 1695, and in Sweden
Anna Eriksdotter in 1704. In other parts of Europe, the practice died down later. In France the last person to be executed for witchcraft was
Louis Debaraz in 1745. In Croatia the last person condemned for witchcraft to the death penalty was
Magda Logomer in 1758. She was acquitted by Maria Theresa in 1758, putting an end to the witch trials in Croatia. In Germany the last death sentence was that of
Anna Schwegelin in
Kempten in 1775 (although not carried out). No reliable sources had been found confirming any executions after the trial. In 1793, two unnamed women were executed in proceedings of dubious legitimacy in
Poznań, Poland.
Anna Göldi was executed in
Glarus, Switzerland in 1782 and
Barbara Zdunk in Prussia in 1811. Both women have been identified as the last women executed for witchcraft in Europe, but in both cases, the official verdict did not mention witchcraft, as this had ceased to be recognized as a criminal offense.
India There is no documented evidence of
witch-hunting in India before 1792. The earliest evidence of witch-hunts in India can be found in the Santhal Witch Trials in 1792. In the
Singhbhum District of the
Chota Nagpur Division in
Company-ruled India, not only were those accused of being witches murdered, but also those related to the accused to ensure that they would not avenge the deaths (Roy Choudhary 1958: 88). The Chhotanagpur region was majorly populated by an
adivasi population called the
Santhals. The existence of witches was a belief central to the Santhals. Witches were feared and were supposed to be engaged in anti-social activities. They were also supposed to have the power to kill people by feeding on their entrails, and causing fevers in cattle among other evils. Therefore, according to the adivasi population the cure to their disease and sickness was the elimination of these witches who were seen as the cause. The practice of witch-hunt among Santhals was more brutal than that in Europe. Unlike Europe, where witches were strangulated before being burnt, the santhals forced them "..to eat human excreta and drink blood before throwing them into the flames." The
East India Company (EIC) banned the persecution of witches in
Gujarat,
Rajputana and
Chota Nagpur Division in the 1840s–1850s. Despite the ban, very few cases were reported as witch-hunting was not seen as a crime. The Santhals believed that the ban in fact allowed the activities of witches to flourish. Thus, the effect of the ban was contrary to what the EIC had intended. During 1857–58, there was a surge in witch-hunting; coinciding during the period of the
Indian Rebellion of 1857, which has led some scholars to see the resurgence of the activity as a form of resistance to Company rule. ==Modern cases==