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

0:00Belief 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. 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

1:02who 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. 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 condemn all people to eternal suffering and hell so yeah they're going big the witches they're

1:52not just fucking about with a bad crop bad harvest in a small town they're like all of you going to hell yeah well they're going political is what they're doing 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. I was listening to a podcast about witches the other day and obviously like in western tradition the idea of a witch is like haggard old crone and it's all to do with fertility it's after because after menopause women are useless to

2:39society so then they become these wise women and that's why our idea of witches is always old and haggard. 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. 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 past-o-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.

3:18In the 9th 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 was 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. 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?

4:08Yeah, OK, well, us too. But this was way worse. The Black Death had wiped out between 30 and 60% 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 non-conformity. There, they believed that the Black Death had been the result of Jewish people poisoning the wells, and hundreds were burnt. But the rest of Christian Europe

4:57chose the witch. In the late 15th century, a Dominican friar called Henrik Kramer wanted to go and hunt witches in the Rhineland. And these days, that is all Western Germany. And a side note, most of the country names we're going to use were not what they were called at the time we are talking about. A lot of Central Europe was a part of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806. But to keep it simple, we're just going to say're modern day equivalents because you can't just be like, so in one bit of the Holy Roman Empire and then another bit, so we're going to use the words that we know. So Cramer wanted to go witch-bashing. And he went to the Pope himself for permission. By then, changing attitudes in the church had led to superstition and blame.

5:41And in 1484, to get the Dominicans off his back, Pope Innocent VIII published an official decree on behalf of the Catholic Church, called Summis deris desi... Summis desi... God fuck's sake. Summis desiderantis effectibus. Nailed it. Crushing it. And this described the terrifying spread of witchcraft through Germany and called on Heinrich Kramer and his other inquisitor, Jakob Sprenger, to go and sort it all out. So they set off across Western Germany on their holy crusade. And based on their experiences, Kramer wrote maybe the most influential book ever written on the occult. The Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of the Witches. It's basically a beginner's guide to identifying witches, proving their guilt, and destroying them.

6:39It consolidated all of the superstitions into one book. On the first page, they reprinted the papal decree in its entirety, giving it a legitimacy beyond the doubt of any God-fearing Christian. The book also suggested torture as a means to extract confessions and death as the only solution. And it told authorities that if they didn't assist in the hunt, then they were a part of the problem. This was huge, and word spread quickly across Europe. This was all shortly after the invention of the world-changing printing press, and the book soon reached the mountainous regions. The areas around the Alps and the Pyrenees are where the first rumblings of the real witch craze kicked off. And there's good reason for that.

7:30Mountains are obviously natural borders, and the people that lived on them were less tied to the religion of their state. Plus, up in the more rural, hard-to-reach places, minds can be hard to change. They hadn't completely escaped the Inquisitors, but they did tend to lapse more easily back into pagan rituals and beliefs. And those tenacious habits of thought drove the missionaries bonkers. So witchcraft became heresy. The Dominican Inquisitors saw social pressure bubbling, and they capitalised on it, to spread a hatred of witches throughout Europe. And they wrote mythology to prove it. So where did all that information come from? Details of the kingdom of heaven are all laid out in the book of Revelation.

8:16But the Bible doesn't say much at all about the devil's own realm. Not to mention his agents of evil on earth. I wrote an essay at university on the appearance of heaven and hell. And it's all to do with this. It's not in the Bible at all. The only thing that's in the Bible is the Jewish afterlife, which is like neither heaven nor hell. It's just sort of like grey. But the Malleus was different. It was full of intricate details of witches, including their physical features, their rituals, and all the sinful ins and outs of demonic orgies. Now we'll go into all the depraved stuff that goes down at a witch's Sabbath next week. But to answer the question of how one Dominican friar knew all that, you can probably guess.

9:07It was mostly all extracted by confession. And once again, we'll go back to that old chestnut that we love to brush off here at Red Handed and on Shorthand. Shiny, shiny chestnut. Shiny chestnut. It's been rubbed so much, it's a mere nub of a chestnut by now. But it goes a little something like this. If you go looking for the devil, you'll find him. And people at the time believed in strict good and evil. So they figured that there must be a whole dark system equivalent to the kingdom of God. It makes sense. So each confession was just another piece of the puzzle. And as for why they saw so much consistency in those answers, well, firstly, they asked very similar, very leading questions. And secondly, they extracted those confessions through torture.

9:59And once again, the Pope was all over it. In 1468, Pope Paul III declared witchcraft to be crimen exceptum, which essentially removed all of the restrictions around torture. And it has been argued that those relaxed rules from the big man were a huge factor in the spread of the craze. Because physical evidence was so hard to find, inquisitors had to find proof where they could. Everything you're about to hear could and was used to identify witches. The inability to shed tears, so anyone on antidepressants. A patch of skin that didn't bleed. A wart, which was obviously used to suckle their familiar. The tendency to look down when accused, or being old, ugly, or stinky. They could all be used as reasons for torture. And I know why you're here. You

10:52want to know what that torture is? Well, we thought you'd never ask. Over to the executioner. The Gracilion was what they called thumbscrews, which I'm sure you all know, slowly crushed the tips of fingers and toes in a vice. The Scots gave it the way too cute name of the penny winkies, which is in some ways even more sinister because it's like it's more scary. It's like get the penny winkies and everybody knows what they're talking about. You're going to destroy your fingers and your toes. Yeah, the Scots are fucking full of it. Do you know what a poppet is? A poppet? Yeah. So when you call someone poppet? No, all I'm thinking is Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's dog. Was that called poppet? I think it was called poppet.

11:36Voodoo dolls, essentially, like a Celtic version. Creepy. Right, the next one, the Eschel, or ladder, was a stretching rack to which they could also add ropes around the arms and legs and slowly tighten to snap the limbs. The lift pulled the arms violently behind the back and the witch chair, or ram, was a set of spikes heated from below that suspects would be forced to sit on. Then you've got the leg screw, or Spanish boot, and this was all the rage in Germany and Scotland. The device was fitted around the foot and the calf of the suspected witch and squeezed until the shin bone shattered. And this has been described as the most severe and cruel pain in the world. And then you've got the bed of nails, which more or less speaks for itself.

12:33That brings us on to maybe the most widely used and effective form of torture, which used no cruel equipment at all. And it was called tormentmentum Insomniae, which I'm sure the sharp-eared among you will already have guessed stands for sleep deprivation. And this would go on for days on end. And some that still insisted they weren't witches after hours on the rack would eventually cave. So the witch craze was mostly kicked off by Dominican inquisitors who were building on the atmosphere of social unrest and wanting to wipe pagan rituals out in Europe. But if Christians versus pagans kicked it off, it was Protestants versus Catholics that made it into a bona fide centuries-long mania. What a surprise. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of a church in 1517,

13:27it started the split of the church into Protestantism and Catholicism. We don't have much time to go into the differences for now, but the Reformation and its sequel, the Counter-Reformation, was an especially bloody part of European history. Mostly because each side was absolutely convinced that they were fighting in the Lord's name and the opposition represented the devil himself. Similar thing happened in the Crusades. And both sides took the existence of witches as an incontrovertible fact. And, quelle surprise, the areas of Europe with the most Catholic versus Protestant friction also had the most reports of witchcraft. In England, it was Essex and Lancashire where Catholicism ran deep

14:11and Puritans did not fuck around, giving rise to our own Witchfinder General. But that is a story for next week. In France, the whole of the southern region was declared to be teeming with demonic witches and in the north, Toulouse became the capital of witch burnings. A French law was written that said children who were said to have attended the witch's mass with their mothers were flogged in front of the fire upon which their mums were burnt. In Germany, the Protestant war against witchcraft was particularly savage. But the Catholic revenge was even worse. The Prince Abbot of Fulda, Balthasar von Derbach, had been driven out by Protestants. So when he returned, he was pissed. So he gave his minister, Balthasar Ross, the name Malefizmeister, or Witchmaster,

15:02and gave him pretty much carte blanche to hunt and execute as many witches as he could for increasing rewards. The witchmaster came up with a load of imaginative new torture methods, and in three years, he sent more than 250 people to the gallows. And I think that the Salem witch trials that happened in my least favorite place to say, Massachusetts, gets a lot of attention when people are talking about witches and the history of witches. But this is a good time to remind everybody that in Europe, we were fucking mad for it. We were burning people, hanging people, torturing people left, right and center. People died by the thousands here. At the Salem witch trials, a grand total of 19 people were killed.

15:50Yeah, I often wonder if we would talk about it at all if the crucible had never been written. It's interesting. I think it is an interesting study of a microcosm of how witch accusations can blow up quickly. Because it happened within this very small community it happened very quickly and it died out just as quickly it was over in a matter of months it really didn't go on for that long because people were like what the fuck are we doing and they really regretted it as soon as it had happened but in europe it went on for fucking years over in germany archbishop elector Elector Johann von Schoenberg dedicated his whole reign to rooting out dissenters. First, he went after the Protestants, then he went

16:33after the Jews, and then, finally, he went after the witches. And this campaign swept the region. In six years, across 22 villages in Germany, 368 witches were burned alive. In the year 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant apiece. One of the court's chief judge, Dietrich Flader, when he spotted that people of noble birth were starting to crop up amongst the accused, he was a lot more lenient um when it came to their punishment and if there's one thing von schoenberg hated it's leniency the judge was immediately accused of witchcraft himself and was subjected to hours of torture until he confessed to his heresy and then he was strangled and burnt to a crisp and that meant that judges all over

17:20stopped being lenient and the main executioner of that area of Germany became a big man on campus and bought himself an expensive horse and strutted around in silver and gold clothes which I imagine is a new look for an executioner. Well they were very wealthy often because they were doing a job that nobody wanted to do and it became like big dynasties of executioners because typically their children weren't able to get any other jobs and they married within other executioner communities and they kind of just hoarded a lot of their wealth because nobody else wanted to enter their families. So they had no one to go to the pub with. They had no one to hang out with. So they just had a lot of money.

18:02But let's continue with all of the horrible witch burnings. So the prince of Würzburg took it even further. In his eight-year reign, eight years, 900 people were sentenced to death for witchcraft. 19 Catholic priests, his own nephew, and a group of seven-year-old children that he claimed had had intercourse with the devil. You do have to wonder, like, how bored were these people? I mean, there wasn't that much going on. No, they're like, we've got to entertain ourselves somehow. Church only takes up one day of the week. And they're like, let's burn witches the rest of the time. And that brings us on to last, but by no means least, the self-styled witch bishop, Prince Johann George Fuchs von Dornheim.

18:50Yikes. Yep. And he built his own dedicated witch house in the garden, complete with his own torture chamber and Bible pages nailed to the wall. Everyone back then was a serial killer. Like, this is the most serial killer shit you're ever gonna hear and it was all state sanctioned as one of his officials johannes julius after hours of unbearable pain confessed that he had renounced god and was in cahoots with the prince of darkness himself he also named for good measure 27 colleagues that he had seen at the witch's Sabbath. And this is the thing, when they're being tortured, it's not just to be like, admit that you've been doing it, admit that you're a witch. They're also like, give us as many names as you can while you can withstand the level of torture that we're putting you

19:40through. But before our friend here, Julius, was burnt, he smuggled a note out of the witch house to his daughter Veronica. And this is what it read. My dearest child, you have here all my acts and confessions for which I must die. It is all a falsehood, an invention. So help me God. They never cease to torture until one says something. If God sends no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burned. By 1620, the mania had reached a fever pitch. Killings had broken all previous records. Lawyers, judges and members of the clergy were routinely being burnt at the stake. This hysteria was built on the idea that the witches of Europe were building a bigger army than anyone could possibly imagine,

20:36and it had to be obliterated. Every witch that was interrogated would, under threat of torture, reveal the names of 15 or 16 other witches in the community, or perhaps in the next village over, and anyone showing a shred of doubt and disbelief would be put to death. And as it got bigger and bigger and more out of control, the massive-scale brutality of the whole thing finally prompted some people to start asking questions. And we mentioned the infamous Wurzburg witch trials a bit earlier on, where the court's chief confessor, Friedrich Spee, sent hundreds of suspected witches to the stake, which actually traumatised him so deeply that his hair turned prematurely white. It's dramatic, Friedrich.

21:18And all too late, he realised all the confessions that he had seen extracted under torture had obviously all been false. In 1631, he even wrote a book, Cortio Criminalis, and secretly distributed it. He didn't even doubt the existence of witches, but he wrote that all Germany smokes everywhere with bonfires which obscure the light. And that, through the whole great persecution, he had never actually seen any witchcraft with his own eyes. Like we said, the book was secretly spread far and wide, and those that read it wrote more about the excesses of torture and brutality in drawing out confessions. Now, we'd love to say that everyone read it and just changed their mind. But not quite The witchcraft stayed a solid part of intellectual, religious and everyday social life

22:11Throughout the whole 17th century And that is only half the story To hear how the fear and violence spread through Scotland and England Via a demonic storm conjured to drown the king himself And to hear how 19-year-old Matthew Hopkins became the self-styled witchfinder general responsible for more executions than anyone in the previous century, and to understand why it was women that took the brunt of the violence, and to hear the sordid details of what was believed to go down on the witch's dark Sabbaths. I'll give you a breadcrumb spoiler to satiate your thirst for next week. The witch's mass includes kissing a goat on the witch's dark sabbaths. I'll give you a breadcrumb spoiler to satiate your thirst for next week.

22:47The witch's mass includes kissing a goat on the bumhole. And we'll tell you all about that next week when you come back to our next dark gathering, Red Handed Cone on Shorthand.