Burning Times

Standard Pagan term for the wave of Witch-hunting hysteria that swept through large parts of Europe (and the Massachusetts Bay Colony) from roughly 1450 - 1700. The usual Pagan myth runs roughly as follows – please note, I cannot stress strongly enough that this version is a myth:

“During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church, eager to increase its power and destroy the last vestiges of Goddess religion, engaged in a continent-wide pogrom to exterminate Wicca. In the process, they also went after pretty much any women who didn’t show the proper submission to patriarchy, especially including healers and midwives (most of whom were Witches anyway). By the time it was over, as many as nine million women had been burned at the stake for Witchcraft.”

In particular, the figure of “nine million” is commonly given as the number of people exterminated during the Burning Times – or sometimes, as “the number of Witches exterminated during the Burning Times.” (The assumption that all those accused were actually Witches or even Wiccans is a common logical fallacy committed in such discussions.) “Never again the Nine Million” is essentially synonymous with “never again the Burning Times.” It’s uncertain where the nine million figure came from in the first place, but one FAQ on a project to list the names of those killed traces it to an interview with Gerald Gardner shortly after World War II, and speculates that the number may simply have been “created from whole cloth”.

The truth of the matter is, as always, more subtle. Major points that should be noted in dealing with the factual Burning Times include:

It was a Renaissance, not Medieval, phenomenon

The timeline is mostly post-Medieval, depending on just when you consider the Medieval era to have ended. Prior to roughly 1300, there were no real witchcraft trials at all in the sense we now think of them; people would very occasionally be prosecuted for negative use of magick, but not for simply “being witches”. The witchcraft persecutions as we think of them didn’t even start until roughly 1400 or 1450, and they continued all the way through the Renaissance and right up to the start of the Age of Enlightenment.

In particular, the main bulk of witchcraft hysteria occurred between 1550 and 1650 – solidly in the middle of the Renaissance. That is to say, right around the times of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Galileo; after Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe.

It was not Catholicism’s fault

Rather than being instigated by the Catholic Church, witch hysteria seems to have been more a product of the Reformation and the friction between Catholicism and the emergence of Protestantism. Witch-hunts were most prominent in eastern France, Switzerland, and Germany – regions where the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism was most pronounced.

Those accused were rarely tried by the Church or any ecclesiatic authority. More frequently, they were tried by civil, secular courts – and these were much more likely to hand out death as a punishment. Catholic courts, in contrast, would usually prescribe a sentence of penance, extirpation, or possibly excommunication – when they’d take the case at all; unless it involved explicit heresy, the Church usually turned a blind eye, preferring to expend its energies on tracking Christian heretics and fighting off the Protestants. (Indeed, the infamous Spanish Inquisition stepped in to stop a witch-craze that started near the Pyrenees. It claimed the sole power to prosecute witch trials – and then adamantly refused to do so, feeling that heresy was a much more important target. The Spanish Inquisition did, of course, have its excesses, but witch-hatred was apparently not one of them.)

The Cause: Civil Hysteria

Since the bulk of trials were performed by civil authorities, they can easily be divided by areas of jurisdiction. It turns out that national-scale courts, when they got involved in witch trials, were surprisingly lenient, condemning only about 30% of those accused.

The local and community-based courts, on the other hand, killed about 90% of accused witches. Apparently they were far too close to the subject (or the accused) to have any objectivity at all, and frequently engaged in the kind of hysterical lynching that we now try to restrict solely to the pages of weekly tabloid papers.

Witch trials not only clustered in areas where there was ecclesiastical unrest (Catholic/Protestant friction), but also around national borders and areas where there was civil unrest: threat of wars, breakdown of established governmental structures, etc. Witch panics were essentially outbreaks of fear, given a channel by superstition.

Nowhere near nine million victims

The “nine million” figure has been soundly debunked. Most rational historians now agree that the correct figure is somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000.

Men were accused and executed, as well

Specific figures vary by region. In Scandinavia and Iceland, the vast majority of accused and sentenced “witches” were male, not female. (Admittedly, these places were remote from the main bulk of the trials.) General estimates of the overall ratio seem to agree that from 20% to 25% of those put to death were men – hardly a specific anti-female pogrom.

Claiming that the Burning Times claimed “nine million women” (or even “100,000 women”) is a distortion similar to the claim that the Holocaust slaughtered only Jews.

Those executed were not witches, and certainly not Wiccans!

This is probably the most egregious error committed by those who consider the Burning Times an anti-Pagan or anti-Wiccan pogrom. Wicca in its modern form simply did not exist during the Renaissance – various bits of what we now call “Wicca” were borrowed by Gerald Gardner from the Golden Dawn and the works of Aleister Crowley; while many of those parts were later removed, they were replaced by even more modern material, such as the poetry of Doreen Valiente.

There may, of course, have been people practicing some survival of pre-Christian religions (i.e., a precursor to Wicca) in Europe during the Reformation. However, there’s no evidence that the ecclesiastic or secular authorities even recognized this activity, never mind actively went out of their way to target it. (Indeed, it wasn’t normally the “authorities” accusing people of witchcraft in the first place; generally individuals would accuse other members of their own community of being witches, out of fear, panic and hysteria.)

Those who were accused and convicted of witchcraft during the Burning Times ran the gamut from serfs to nobles, commoners, merchants, farmers and tradespeople; they included rich, poor, and everywhere in between. Nobody was safe. Being accused of witchcraft didn’t mean you were a witch at all (by any definition of the word); it simply meant you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had gotten unlucky.

The idea that midwives and herbal healers were particularly targeted also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; according to analysis of the trial records, those who engaged in either of those activities account for only 2% to 20% of the trials, varying by area.

One additional note, about the usual “burning at the stake” concept: while those convicted of witchcraft were indeed usually burned on the Continent, the method of execution in England and the American Colonies was usually by hanging instead. If anyone claims to have been “burned as a Witch” in a past life in either of those places, they’re being exceedingly fanciful, and historically incorrect.

It should be pointed out that not all Wiccans believe in the mythic version of the Burning Times; some, indeed, are quite active in trying to spread the truth. Covenant of the Goddess has an excellent essay on the archæological evidence and its conclusions.

Despite the usual inaccuracies, it should not be forgotten that Europe went through a period, roughly 250 to 300 years long and peaking for a century, during which anyone could be accused of witchcraft at any time, and that during this time, at least 50,000 people were either burned or hung. While this pales in comparison to the number of people that died of plagues during the same time, plagues are not deliberate actions by other human beings. The phrase “the Burning Times” is still a powerful one in evoking a time when people would put their fellow humans to death, solely on the basis of fear and superstition.

National Geographic has an “interactive” witch-hunt that tries to give an idea of what it would have been like to be accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692. (The “interactivity” is limited to your decision of whether to confess to witchcraft, or claim innocence.) Alternatively, listening to Kate Bush’s “Waking the Witch” (on her album Hounds of Love) may give a good impression of the horror, especially if you have a copy of the lyrics available.

The site “The Killings of Witches” lists the names of those executed for witchcraft, by name and year, and has a variety of other interesting information.