The Burning Times

Vibe Tribe Chat

10-29-2024

I had a tough time writing this one.  

The earliest known record of a witch is in the Bible, in the book of 1 Samuel, which is thought to have been written between 931 B.C. and 721 B.C. The story is about King Saul who seeks out the Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of the prophet Samuel, to help him defeat the Philistine army.

During the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires (883–539 B.C.), magic was immersed in the everyday life of the Mesopotamian peoples. 

All through history there are accounts of witchcraft. Including villages with medicine men and women. They were known for doing magics for healing.

People used to live in harmony. When nature, family and friends were the important things in life, because they were life itself. People worked, lived and celebrated together. The turning of the seasons was a time of celebration and thanks for which they had worked hard. They prayed to their Deities for good harvests, fertile land and a bountiful hunting season. Each person, no matter what their age, had a job to perform. They learned at the earliest of ages to participate and enjoy the fruits of their labor. It was their way and life was good.

Each form of nature was known as a separate spirit and had its own name. That Deity or spirit would be called upon as needed. They prayed for their planting to become a plentiful harvest, then gave them offerings to ensure that their gathered herbs would dry properly and provide them with the medicines that they might need at another time. With this growth they needed someone with vast knowledge and wisdom they could turn to in times of need. They called them the Witan, the Wise Ones, Wica, Wita, Shaman, Medicine man, Council of the Wise, etc.... Even a wise King would never make a decision without consulting one of the Wise. They held positions of prestige and power. Most were knowledgeable in herbs, legal matters, magics, and/or divination.

Women were the givers of life and the healers. The men were the providers of life and the protectors. Today, many archeologists find female statues in the villages and male statues surrounding the villages.

The last of the Merovingian Kings - whose name was Clovis (c. 465-511) - was very confident that he could unify the Frankish Kingdom. He knew that he could conquer them and, introduced them to Christianity, and obtained the help of the Pope. The people of the Franks were Catholic, so this was a very smart change on his behalf. Now if he could gain their trust and it worked, they would welcome him as a religious liberator.

Several hundred years later Charlemagne, a very powerful Carolingian King, who ruled much of Western Europe from 768 to 814, made a pact with another Pope. He let the Pope Leo III crown him as King in the name of Jesus Christ, which gave the Pope an especially important political position and the King a little extra power because of the backing of the Church.

Christianity was now the official religion of the Franks. Over a period of time the old religion got pushed away and the Roman Catholics took over. Slowly what the Witan were saying got turned around and used against them. Rumors and gossip began.

More and more men came into power because of their physical strength. By the time Catholicism came into play, men where really feeling their oats: they had power and wanted to use it. Women were being seen as the weaker of the sexes because most didn’t have the same physical strength as men.

When Christianity came, it did not just come in and take over. This occurred over a period of almost 1,500 years. In order for people to accept Catholicism, there were many things adapted from the pagan religions. This was a good way for people to feel comfortable with the changes that were being made. It was a choice for people to accept the One God, everyone believing the same thing and in the same ways. No more conflict, or so it was said.

Catholicism was also a way to bring men into more power. They were the Popes and Kings. They had the Power and wanted more. Things were purposely taken out of context and then it leaked out some of what was taking place behind the castle walls. Now there was doubt among the people. The King and the Pope said they needed to attach an evil intent to the old religion, because people started going back to the old ways and the Kings and Pope were losing power, so they sent out troops to find something that would give them their power back.

They discovered a Pagan Greek God by the name of Pan, which had horns on his head and the bottom half of a goat. They brought this image back and identified him with Satan. They cast him as the Head Devil that was worshipped for pleasure. Orgies and sex magick were used in order to get what these people wanted. Some of the women had sex with this God and were filled with his sperm in order to received magickal abilities. With this power they were said to corrupt others and cast spells upon those that they did not like.

It only took about 400 years in some places, but it became mandatory to be Christian. No longer was there a choice for the people, but a decision made for the people, on whom to worship and how to live. The charges started out as treason, later on became heresy and then witchcraft.

They took pagan traditions and adapted them. The Green Man was burned, made up of branches and twigs, and then tied together in the shape of a man, for a blessing for fertility for the land. This was turned into bigger wicker cages, built and filled with criminals and animals to cleanse the lands of evil by burning them.

Churches were built on pagan ritual sites so they couldn’t practice on their sacred land, and the Gods and Goddesses turned into Saints or demons. Only those who went to school to be doctors could practice healing and midwifery, The women were not allowed to go to school because they were evil, and their evil might get inflicted upon the men. If caught practicing, they were labeled as heretics and traitors which became heresy and then witchcraft.

Women were viewed as sexual creatures who would put hexes on you, so no longer were they allowed to have any enjoyment. Sex became a job to do for the husband, and the men were allowed to take from their wife what they wanted. The church also told the men to beat their wives so they could keep them in line.

 

Under this Pope’s new conclusion, in 1258, it became acceptable for the Inquisition to try individuals for heresy based on an accusation of witchcraft. The anti-witch frenzy grew slowly.

When the Church turned against the Knights Templar, in the 1300s, they utilized witchcraft charges to bring them down. Pope John XXII super legitimized witchcraft when he accused one of his bishops of using sorcery to try to kill him in 1317. Then, from 1347-1351, Europe was hit hard by the plague.

When building the pyres, they were made of bundles of wood called fags. Any men that were known to have sex with other men were put onto the pyres to help keep the fires burning extremely hot, as were the witch’s familiars, of which were mostly cats. Not thinking all of this through, they brought the bubonic plague onto themselves. Because most of the cats were killed, they were not there to kill the rats, and the rats became over-ridden with fleas, which carried the plague. What comes around go around; but of course, all of it was the witch’s fault or so say those in charge.

Heinrich Kramer (1440-1505) a German Monk, was young when he joined the Dominicans. They were the Order of Monks charged with managing the Inquisition and he was all about ‘Getting the Witch’s”. In order to prosecute witches for heresy, Heinrich found it hard to get a witch before the Inquisition’s assessors.

 Pope Innocent VIII invested in the trade of enslaved Africans, he ran a scheme of targeting Noble Women and accusing them of heresy so the church could seize their money, and he literally created positions within the church to be sold to the highest bidder. Pope Innocent promoted Heinrich to Head of the Inquisition. Pope Innocent draws up a papal decree which affirms that witches are real, that they are heretics, that the Church has the right to try them, and anyone who interferes are charged as heretics and subject to punishment.

Heinrich writes most of the Malleus Maleficarum. This is known as the Witches Hammer. Another monk helped him write part of it. He was Austrian and a Dominican, and his name was Jakob Sprenger. This papal bull was published in 1484 and this piece of work, helped to create the hysteria of the witch burnings, torture and hangings. Their work gave explicit directions of what witches did, how to hunt, torture and/or kill them. This was the largest selling book except for the bible. Not thinking all of this through, they brought upon themselves death and destruction. ?

If you wanted to get rid of someone who you didn't like, then turn him or her in as a witch. The witch hunters would come into a town and get the witches. The witches would have to pay for the trip to the court, have to pay for the executioners, for all the court costs, their meals, all of it. This money would get turned into the witch hunters for their services and the town leaders would of course get their cut if they helped turn in witches. Most were not witches, but then everyone knew that. You had to be very careful of what you said and did. Don't get the wrong person mad at you or else you are off to the gallows. The sad thing is that the ones who turned in witches often got executed as well (they were known as warlocks (traitors of witches)).

This was a dangerous time to be a healer, midwife, diviner, herbalist, or to be an outspoken, independent woman. The witch trials were largely a targeted attack on women, especially those who had sexual relationships while unmarried, received or performed abortions, or wielded “too much” power and influence in their communities. They were also an attack on anyone who spoke about things such as wealth inequality and privatization of communal land.

Anything that was unexplainable, a lie, out of the ordinary or anyone that you wanted to be removed was listed as a witch. In order to cleanse a witch, they were to be hanged or drowned. If you survived, then you were a witch. If you died then you were in God’s hands, and isn’t that where you want to be anyway? Some just burned the witches because there were too many bodies, especially in the bigger villages. It was known as the only true way to cleanse a witch’s soul.

When the witches were charged, the accused had to pay for everything. They paid for their jail cell, lawyer, torture, torturer, court, food, everything. Oh, and don’t forget to strip them because they could be hiding something and shave their heads because they could have a hex braid -- then we can also add on barber charges so we can get all of their monies.

There was lots of money to be made.  They went from town to town making money. At first it was not the nobles, but after a while, greed took over. It took about 200 years to turn paganism into heresy and witches into Satanists. Wars were fought constantly, sometimes over the same thing. The Holy Office of the Inquisition around mid-1500’s stopped hunting witches and started using more peaceful mean to keep faith in the churches. In 1563, Queen Elizabeth I did allow persecution of witches, but it was no longer lawful as heresy and so it was listed as sorcery: if you murdered by witchcraft, it was punishable by death.

In the West, Galileo and Newton were working with revolutionary scientific ideas, which undermined the idea of witchcraft. So, the idea of witchcraft and sorcery went back and forth.

The Würzburg witch trials of 1625–1631, which formed one of the biggest mass trials and mass executions ever seen, and one of the largest witch trials in history.

In 1604, King James I passed the Witchcraft Act, but it was overturned in 1736. It was then said that there was no such thing as witchcraft. If you pretended to have psychic abilities, you could be charged with fraud and taken to jail. You had to pretend to be a Christian and worship Their God.

It was not until 1921 that Witchcraft came back into the open a little because of Margaret Murray (1863-1963), who was an anthropologist. Murray remains a controversial figure, yet much of what she uncovered, from the records of the early Witchcraft trials, was valid.

In 1951 in England, the last of the laws about witchcraft were repealed, which gave way for a few witches to start coming out of the closet; and so, they did.

Gerald Gardner who lived in England and was the first to speak up in 1954 with one of his books and say that he was a witch. He talked about covens and other witches. He wrote about what their beliefs were, and how they worshipped.

 

Even in today’s digital social society, there are still witch hunting’s going on. In the US people are being run out of their stores and homes for being a witch. Businesses burnt to the ground because of fear.

The most commonly known today is the witch hunting in Africa, totaling in the hundreds every year. And those are just the ones reported. A society deeply embedded in magics. Adults as well as children are being attacked, beaten, hacked up and burned by their families and villagers. When they are not killed, they are run out of the village or dropped off into a remote area far from home. There are multitudes of witches living in government villages who can no longer go home.

This stems from albino children (who are targeted 1st) and their mothers, to men stealing penis’s (which hasn’t been proven), to older women (who are not of childbearing years, because they can’t add to the workforce).

As with its European ancestor, witch-hunting in South Africa is closely tied not only to widespread superstitions, but to socio-economic pressures, natural disasters, and personal jealousies. In the Northern Province, among the poorly educated village residents, traditional healers and psychics claiming supernatural powers, villagers are quick to blame any bad act of fate on black magic. Hunger, poverty, and unemployment can create jealousy that can quickly turn to anger and retaliation.

These traditional tendencies have been aggravated by a recent hysteria over the very real phenomenon of ritual killings related to witchcraft, which include the removal of organs and limbs from the victims, the genitals, hands or the head, all of which are believed to bring good luck.

There is so much more to this subject. These are just a few of the highlights. And this just didn’t happen to witches. Most of the people who endured these times were innocents caught up in the brutal actions of the time. I know that I lived during that time in another life, but I just don’t want to remember living during that time.

I am grateful for all those who have opened their minds to newer things. Not all have, but these past few years there have been more and more.

This is a time when the veil between the worlds is the thinnest. Let’s all open our mind’s eye and welcome any messages from loved ones, our elders, ancients, and Spirit. This is the Witches New Year. The end and the beginning of things to come. Change is in the air. Don’t resist. Be open and accepting because things happen for a reason.

 

***Please bring out your candles and I want to light them for what our ancestors lived through and went through in order for us to live as we choose. They have paved the way for us in this lifetime. I don’t know how much any of us could endure as they did.

As we light these candles, please call out any names you would like to lift up. This can be any loved ones who have passed, family, friends, and any of those who endured that life.

 

Now for all those who lived through the Burning Times, we say “Thank you.”