From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A
witch-hunt or
witch purge is a search for people labelled "witches" or evidence of
witchcraft, often involving
moral panic or
mass hysteria. The
classical period of witch-hunts in
Early Modern Europe and
Colonial North America took place in the
Early Modern period or about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the
Reformation and the
Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 100,000 executions.
Including illegal and summary executions it is estimated 200,000 or
more "witches" were tortured, burnt or hanged in the Western world from
1500 until around 1800. The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century. In other regions, like
Africa and
Asia, contemporary witch-hunts have been reported from
Sub-Saharan Africa and
Papua New Guinea and official legislation against witchcraft is still found in
Saudi Arabia and
Cameroon today.
In current language, "witch hunt" metaphorically means an
investigation usually conducted with much publicity, supposedly to
uncover subversive activity, disloyalty and so on, but really to weaken
political opposition.
Anthropological causes
The wide distribution of the practice of witch-hunts in
geographically and culturally separated societies (Europe, Africa,
India, New Guinea) since the 1960s has triggered interest in the
anthropological background of this behaviour. The belief in
magic and
divination, and attempts to use magic to influence personal well-being (to increase life, win love, etc.) are human
cultural universals.
Belief in witchcraft has been shown to have similarities in
societies throughout the world. It presents a framework to explain the
occurrence of otherwise random misfortunes such as sickness or death,
and the witch sorcerer provides an image of evil. Reports on indigenous practices in the Americas, Asia and Africa collected during the early modern
age of exploration
have been taken to suggest that not just the belief in witchcraft but
also the periodic outbreak of witch-hunts are a human cultural
universal.
One study finds that witchcraft beliefs are associated with
antisocial attitudes: lower levels of trust, charitable giving and group
participation.
Another study finds that income shocks (caused by extreme rainfall)
lead to a large increase in the murder of "witches" in Tanzania.
History
Ancient Near East
Punishment for malevolent
sorcery is addressed in the earliest
law codes which were preserved; in both ancient
Egypt and
Babylonia, where it played a conspicuous part. The
Code of Hammurabi (18th century BC
short chronology) prescribes that
If a man has put a spell upon
another man and it is not yet justified, he upon whom the spell is laid
shall go to the holy river; into the holy river shall he plunge. If the
holy river overcome him and he is drowned, the man who put the spell
upon him shall take possession of his house. If the holy river declares
him innocent and he remains unharmed the man who laid the spell shall be
put to death. He that plunged into the river shall take possession of
the house of him who laid the spell upon him.
Classical antiquity
In Classical Athens, no laws concerning magic survive.
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.
Antiphon's speech "
Against the Stepmother for Poisoning" tells of the case of a woman accused of plotting to murder her husband with a
pharmakon;
a slave had previously been executed for the crime, but the son of the
victim claimed that the death had been arranged by his stepmother. The most detailed account of a trial for witchcraft in Classical Greece is the story of
Theoris of Lemnos, who was executed along with her children some time before 338 BC, supposedly for casting incantations and using harmful drugs.
In 451 BC, the
Twelve Tables of
Roman law
had provisions against evil incantations and spells intended to damage
cereal crops. In 331 BC, 170 women were executed as witches in the
context of an
epidemic illness.
Livy emphasizes that this was a scale of persecution without precedent in Rome.
In 186 BC, the Roman senate issued a decree severely restricting
the Bacchanals, ecstatic rites celebrated in honor of Dionysus. Livy
records that this persecution was because "there was nothing wicked,
nothing flagitious, that had not been practiced among them". Consequent to the ban, in 184 BC, about 2,000 people were executed for witchcraft (
veneficium), and in 182–180 BC another 3,000 executions took place,
again triggered by the outbreak of an epidemic. There is no way to
verify the figures reported by Roman historians, but if they are taken
at face value, the scale of the witch-hunts in the
Roman Republic
in relation to the population of Italy at the time far exceeded
anything that took place during the "classical" witch-craze in Early
Modern Europe. Persecution of witches continued in the
Roman Empire until the late 4th century AD and abated only after the introduction of
Christianity as the Roman state religion in the 390s.
The
Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis promulgated by
Lucius Cornelius Sulla
in 81 BC became an important source of late medieval and early modern
European law on witchcraft. This law banned the trading and possession
of harmful drugs and poisons, possession of magical books and other
occult paraphernalia.
Strabo,
Gaius Maecenas and
Cassius Dio all reiterate the traditional Roman opposition against sorcery and divination, and
Tacitus used the term
religio-superstitio to class these outlawed observances. Emperor
Augustus
strengthened legislation aimed at curbing these practices, for instance
in 31 BC, by burning over 2,000 magical books in Rome, except for
certain portions of the hallowed
Sibylline Books. In AD 354, while Tiberius Claudius was emperor, 45 men and 85 women, who were all suspected of sorcery, were executed.
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.
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
Ashkelon.
Later the women's relatives took revenge by bringing (reportedly) false
witnesses against Simeon's son and causing him to be executed in turn.
Late antiquity
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
found among his people certain witches, whom he called in his native tongue Haliurunnae.
Suspecting these women, he expelled them from the midst of his race and
compelled them to wander in solitary exile afar from his army. There
the unclean spirits, who beheld them as they wandered through the
wilderness, bestowed their embraces upon them and begat this savage
race, which dwelt at first in the swamps, a stunted, foul and puny
tribe, scarcely human, and having no language save one which bore but
slight resemblance to human speech.
Middle Ages
Christianisation in the Early Middle Ages
The Councils of
Elvira (306),
Ancyra (314), and
Trullo
(692) 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, explicitly outlawed condemning people as witches and
condemned to death anyone who burnt a witch. The Lombard code of 643
states:
Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or
female servant as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be
believed by Christian minds.
This conforms to the teachings of the
Canon Episcopi of circa 900 AD (alleged to date from 314 AD), which, following the thoughts of
Augustine of Hippo,
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,
[25] and a sermon by
Agobard of Lyons (810).
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 presumption of their having
caused storms or failure of crops or pestilence. Neither were these the
only examples of an effort to prevent unjust suspicion to which such
poor creatures might be exposed.
On many different occasions, ecclesiastics who spoke with authority did
their best to disabuse the people of their superstitious belief in
witchcraft. This, for instance, is the general purport of the book,
Contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis ("Against the foolish belief of the common sort concerning hail and thunder"), written by
Agobard (d. 841),
Archbishop of Lyons. A comparable situation in
Russia is suggested in a sermon by
Serapion of Vladimir (written in 1274/5), where the popular superstition of witches causing crop failures is denounced.
Early secular laws against witchcraft include those promulgated by King
Athelstan (924–939):
And we have ordained respecting witch-crafts, and lybacs [read lyblac "sorcery"], and morthdaeds ["murder, mortal sin"]:
if any one should be thereby killed, and he could not deny it, that he
be liable in his life. But if he will deny it, and at threefold ordeal
shall be guilty; that he be 120 days in prison: and after that let
kindred take him out, and give to the king 120 shillings, and pay the wer to his kindred, and enter into borh for him, that he evermore desist from the like.
In some prosecutions for witchcraft, torture (permitted by the
Roman civil law) apparently took place. However,
Pope Nicholas I (866), prohibited the use of torture altogether, and a similar decree may be found in the
Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.
Later Middle Ages
The manuals of the Roman Catholic
Inquisition
remained highly skeptical of witch accusations, although there was
sometimes an overlap between accusations of heresy and of witchcraft,
particularly when, in the 13th century, the newly formed Inquisition was
commissioned to deal with the
Cathars
of Southern France, whose teachings were charged with containing an
admixture of witchcraft and magic. Although it has been proposed that
the witch-hunt developed in Europe from the early 14th century, after
the Cathars and the
Templar Knights were suppressed, this hypothesis has been rejected independently by two historians (Cohn 1975; Kieckhefer 1976).
In 1258,
Pope Alexander IV declared a canon that alleged witchcraft was not to be investigated by the Church. 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 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
drowned. 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?
Transition to the early modern witch-hunts
The
Malleus Maleficarum
(the 'Hammer against the Witches'), published in 1487, accused women of
destroying men by planting bitter herbs throughout the field.
The resurgence of witch-hunts at the end of the medieval period,
taking place with at least partial support or at least tolerance on the
part of the Church, was accompanied with a number of developments in
Christian doctrine, for example the recognition of the existence of
witchcraft as a form of Satanic influence and its classification as a
heresy. As
Renaissance occultism gained traction among the educated classes, the belief in witchcraft, which in the medieval period had been part of the
folk religion
of the uneducated rural population at best, was incorporated into an
increasingly comprehensive theology of Satan as the ultimate source of
all
maleficium. These doctrinal shifts were completed in the mid-15th century, specifically in the wake of the
Council of Basel and centered on the
Duchy of Savoy in the western Alps, leading to an early series of witch trials by both secular and ecclesiastical courts in the second half of the 15th century.
In 1484,
Pope Innocent VIII issued
Summis desiderantes affectibus, a
Papal bull
authorizing the "correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising" of
devil-worshippers who have "slain infants", among other crimes. He did
so at the request of inquisitor
Heinrich Kramer, who had been refused permission by the local bishops in Germany to investigate. 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 soon
banned by the Church in 1490, and Kramer was
censured, but it was nevertheless reprinted in 14 editions by 1520 and became unduly influential in the secular courts. In 1538, the
Spanish Inquisition cautioned its members not to believe what the
Malleus said, even when it presented apparently firm evidence.
Early Modern Europe
The torture used against accused witches, 1577
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, Protestant
Christianity and its proxy secular institutions deemed witchcraft as
being associated to wild
Satanic ritual parties in which there was much 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.
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. 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, including
Scotland and the northernmost periphery of Europe in northern Norway.
Learned European ideas about witchcraft, demonological ideas, strongly
influenced the hunt of witches in the North.
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 of 1542 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. The
Pendle witch trials of 1612 are among the most famous witch trials in English history.
The
Malefizhaus of
Bamberg, Germany, where suspected witches were held and interrogated. 1627 engraving.
In England, witch-hunting would reach its apex in 1644 to 1647 due to the work of
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 into water strapped
to a chair to see if she floated, was discontinued in 1645 due to a
legal challenge. The 1647 book,
The Discovery of Witches, was soon influential in legal texts. The book was used in the
American colonies as early as May 1647, when
Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in
Connecticut, the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from 1647 to 1663.
Witch-hunts in North America began about the time of Hopkins. In 1645, forty-six years before the notorious
Salem witch trials,
Springfield, Massachusetts experienced America's first accusations of
witchcraft
when husband and wife Hugh and Mary Parsons accused each other of
witchcraft. In America's first witch trial, Hugh was found innocent,
while Mary was acquitted of witchcraft but she was still sentenced to be
hanged as punishment for the death of her child. She died in prison. 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 1645–1663. The
Salem witch trials followed in 1692–93.
Once a case was brought to trial, the prosecutors hunted for
accomplices. Magic was not considered to be wrong because it failed, but
because it worked effectively for the wrong reasons. Witchcraft was a
normal part of everyday life. Witches were often called for, along with
religious ministers, to help the ill or to deliver a baby. They held
positions of spiritual power in their communities. When something went
wrong, no one questioned the ministers or the power of the witchcraft.
Instead, they questioned whether the witch intended to inflict harm or
not.
Current scholarly estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft vary between about 40,000 and 100,000. 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).
Execution statistics
An image of suspected witches being hanged in England, published in 1655
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 40,000 and 50,000 (see table below for
details), but some estimate there were 200,000 to 500,000 executed for witchcraft, and others estimated 1,000,000 or more.
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."
While it appears to be the case that the clear majority of
victims in Germany were women, in other parts of Europe the witch-hunts
targeted primarily men, thus in Iceland 92% of the accused were men, in
Estonia 60%, and in Moscow two-thirds of those accused were male.
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. The claim that "millions of witches" (often: "
nine million witches") were killed in Europe occasionally found in popular literature is spurious, and ultimately due to a 1791 pamphlet by
Gottfried Christian Voigt.
Approximate statistics on the number of trials for witchcraft
and executions in various regions of Europe in the period 1450–1750:
| Region |
Number of trials |
Number of executions
|
| British Isles and North America |
~5,000 |
~1,500–2,000
|
| Holy Roman Empire (Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Lorraine, Austria including Czech lands – Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia) |
~50,000 |
~25,000–30,000
|
| France |
~3,000 |
~1,000
|
| Scandinavia |
~5,000 |
~1,700–2,000
|
| Central & Eastern Europe (Poland-Lithuania, Hungary and Russia) |
~7,000 |
~2,000
|
| Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Italy) |
~10,000 |
~1,000
|
| Total: |
~80,000 |
~35,000
|
End of European witch hunts in the 18th century
The drowning of an alleged witch, with
Thomas Colley 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.
Kate Nevin was hunted for three weeks and eventually suffered death by
Faggot and Fire at Monzie in
Perthshire, Scotland in 1715.
Janet Horne
was executed for witchcraft in Scotland in 1727. The final Act of 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.
The last execution of a witch in the Dutch Republic was probably in 1613. In Denmark, this took place in 1693 with the execution of
Anna Palles. 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 Germany the last death sentence was that of
Anna Schwegelin in
Kempten in 1775 (although not carried out). The last known official witch-trial was the
Doruchów witch trial in Poland in 1783. Two unnamed women were executed in
Poznań, Poland, in 1793, in proceedings of dubious legitimacy.
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
Chhotanagpur division in
British India,
not only were those accused of being witches murdered, but also those
related to the accused to ensure that they won't 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 British banned the persecution of witches in Gujarat,
Rajasthan and Chhotanagpur in the 1840s–1850s. They saw the practise as
barbaric and tried to dismantle the belief in witchcraft by providing
medical facilities. However, they undermined the extent to which the
belief was socially embedded. 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 witches to flourish. Thus, the effect
of the ban was contrary to what the British had intended. During
1857–58, there was a surge in witch hunting. This can be viewed as a
mode of resistance to the British rule as part of the larger revolt of
1857.
Modern cases
Monument for the victims of the witch-hunts of 16th- and 17th-century Bernau, Germany by
Annelie Grund
Witch hunts still occur today in societies where belief in
magic is prevalent. In most cases, these are instances of
lynching and burnings, reported with some regularity from much of
Sub-Saharan Africa, from rural
North India
and from Papua New Guinea. In addition, there are some countries that
have legislation against the practice of sorcery. The only country where
witchcraft remains legally punishable by
death is Saudi Arabia.
Witch hunts in modern times are continuously reported by the
UNHCR of the
UNO
as a massive violation of human rights. Most of the accused are women
and children but can also be elderly people or marginalised groups of
the community such as
albinos and the
HIV-infected.
These victims are often considered burdens to the community, and as a
result are often driven out, starved to death, or killed violently,
sometimes by their own families in acts of
social cleansing.
The causes of witch hunts include poverty, epidemics, social crises and
lack of education. The leader of the witch hunt, often a prominent
figure in the community or a "witch doctor", may also gain economic
benefit by charging for an
exorcism or by selling body parts of the murdered.
Sub-Saharan Africa
In many societies of
Sub-Saharan Africa,
the fear of witches drives periodic witch-hunts during which specialist
witch-finders identify suspects, with death by mob often the result. Countries particularly affected by this phenomenon include
South Africa,
Cameroon, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, the
Gambia,
Ghana,
Kenya,
Sierra Leone,
Tanzania, and
Zambia.
Witch-hunts against children were reported by the BBC in 1999 in the Congo and in Tanzania, where the government responded to attacks on women accused of being witches for having red eyes.
[91] A lawsuit was launched in 2001 in Ghana, where witch-hunts are also common, by a woman accused of being a witch. Witch-hunts in Africa are often led by relatives seeking the property of the accused victim.
Audrey I. Richards, in the journal
Africa, relates in 1935 an instance when a new wave of witchfinders, the
Bamucapi, appeared in the villages of the
Bemba people of Zambia.
They dressed in European clothing, and would summon the headman to
prepare a ritual meal for the village. When the villagers arrived they
would view them all in a
mirror,
and claimed they could identify witches with this method. These witches
would then have to "yield up his horns"; i.e. give over the
horn containers for
curses and evil
potions to the witch-finders. The bamucapi then made all drink a potion called
kucapa which would cause a witch to die and swell up if he ever tried such things again.
The villagers related that the witch-finders were always right
because the witches they found were always the people whom the village
had feared all along. The bamucapi utilised a mixture of Christian and
native religious traditions to account for their powers and said that
God (not specifying which God) helped them to prepare their medicine. In
addition, all witches who did not attend the meal to be identified
would be called to account later on by their master, who had risen from
the dead, and who would force the witches by means of drums to go to the
graveyard, where they would die. Richards noted that the bamucapi
created the sense of danger in the villages by rounding up
all
the horns in the village, whether they were used for anti-witchcraft
charms, potions, snuff or were indeed receptacles of black magic.
The Bemba people believed misfortunes such as
wartings,
hauntings and
famines
to be just actions sanctioned by the High-God Lesa. The only agency
which caused unjust harm was a witch, who had enormous powers and was
hard to detect. After white rule of Africa, beliefs in sorcery and
witchcraft grew, possibly because of the social strain caused by new
ideas, customs and laws, and also because the courts no longer allowed
witches to be tried.
Amongst the
Bantu tribes of Southern Africa, the
witch smellers
were responsible for detecting witches. In parts of Southern Africa,
several hundred people have been killed in witch hunts since 1990.
Cameroon has re-established witchcraft-accusations in courts after its independence in 1967.
It was reported on 21 May 2008 that in Kenya a mob had
burnt to death at least 11 people accused of witchcraft.
In March 2009, Amnesty International reported that up to 1,000
people in the Gambia had been abducted by government-sponsored "witch
doctors" on charges of witchcraft, and taken to detention centers where
they were forced to drink poisonous concoctions. On 21 May 2009,
The New York Times reported that the alleged witch-hunting campaign had been sparked by the Gambian President,
Yahya Jammeh.
In Sierra Leone, the witch-hunt is an occasion for a sermon by the
kɛmamɔi (native
Mende
witch-finder) on social ethics : "Witchcraft ... takes hold in people's
lives when people are less than fully open-hearted. All wickedness is
ultimately because people hate each other or are jealous or suspicious
or afraid. These emotions and motivations cause people to act
antisocially". The response by the populace to the
kɛmamɔi is that "they valued his work and would learn the lessons he came to teach them, about social responsibility and cooperation."
South-Central Asia
In
India,
labeling a woman as a witch is a common ploy to grab land, settle
scores or even to punish her for turning down sexual advances. In a
majority of the cases, it is difficult for the accused woman to reach
out for help and she is forced to either abandon her home and family or
driven to commit suicide. Most cases are not documented because it is
difficult for poor and illiterate women to travel from isolated regions
to file police reports. Less than 2% of those accused of witch-hunting
are actually convicted, according to a study by the Free Legal Aid
Committee, a group that works with victims in the state of Jharkhand.
A 2010 estimate places the number of women killed as witches in
India at between 150 and 200 per year, or a total of 2,500 in the period
of 1995 to 2009. The lynchings are particularly common in the poor
northern states of
Jharkhand,
Bihar and the central state of
Chhattisgarh.
Witch hunts are also taking place among the tea garden workers in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal India.
The witch hunts in Jalpaiguri are less known, but are motivated by the
stress in the tea industry on the lives of the adivasi workers.
Witch hunts in
Nepal are common, and are targeted especially against low-caste women. The main causes of witchcraft related violence include widespread
belief in superstition, lack of education, lack of public awareness,
illiteracy, caste system, male domination, and economic dependency of
women on men. The victims of this form of violence are often beaten,
tortured, publicly humiliated, and murdered. Sometimes, the family
members of the accused are also assaulted.
In 2010, Sarwa Dev Prasad Ojha, minister for women and social welfare,
said, "Superstitions are deeply rooted in our society, and the belief in
witchcraft is one of the worst forms of this."
Papua New Guinea
Though the practice of "white" magic (such as
faith healing) is legal in Papua New Guinea, the 1976 Sorcery Act imposed a penalty of up to 2 years in prison for the practice of
"black" magic,
until the Act was repealed in 2013. In 2009, the government reports
that extrajudicial torture and murder of alleged witches – usually lone
women – are spreading from the highland areas to cities as villagers
migrate to urban areas.
For example, in June 2013, four women were accused of witchcraft
because the family "had a 'permanent house' made of wood, and the family
had tertiary educations and high social standing". All of the women were tortured and Helen Rumbali was beheaded.
Helen Hakena, chairwoman of the North Bougainville Human Rights
Committee, said that the accusations started because of economic
jealousy born of a mining boom.
Reports by U.N. agencies, Amnesty International, Oxfam and
anthropologists show that "attacks on accused sorcerers and witches –
sometimes men, but most commonly women – are frequent, ferocious and
often fatal."
It's estimated about 150 cases of violence and killings are occurring
each year in just the province of Simbu in Papua New Guinea alone.
Reports indicate this practice of witch hunting has in some places
evolved into "something more malignant, sadistic and voyeuristic."
One woman who was attacked by young men from a nearby village "had her
genitals burned and fused beyond functional repair by the repeated
intrusions of red-hot irons."
Few incidents are ever reported, according to the 2012 Law Reform
Commission which concluded that they have increased since the 1980s.
Saudi Arabia
Witchcraft or sorcery remains a criminal offense in
Saudi Arabia, although the precise nature of the crime is undefined.
The frequency of prosecutions for this in the country as whole is
unknown. However, in November 2009, it was reported that 118 persons
had been arrested in the province of Makkah that year for practicing
magic and "using the Book of Allah in a derogatory manner", 74% of them
being female. According to
Human Rights Watch
in 2009, prosecutions for witchcraft and sorcery are proliferating and
"Saudi courts are sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious
police."
In 2006, an illiterate Saudi woman,
Fawza Falih,
was convicted of practising witchcraft, including casting an impotence
spell, and sentenced to death by beheading, after allegedly being beaten
and forced to fingerprint a false confession that had not been read to
her.
After an appeal court had cast doubt on the validity of the death
sentence because the confession had been retracted, the lower court
reaffirmed the same sentence on a different basis.
In 2007, Mustafa Ibrahim, an Egyptian national, was executed,
having been convicted of using sorcery in an attempt to separate a
married couple, as well as of adultery and of desecrating the Quran.
Also in 2007, Abdul Hamid Bin Hussain Bin Moustafa al-Fakki, a
Sudanese national, was sentenced to death after being convicted of
producing a spell that would lead to the reconciliation of a divorced
couple.
In 2009,
Ali Sibat,
a Lebanese television presenter who had been arrested whilst on a
pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to death for witchcraft
arising out of his fortune-telling on an Arab satellite channel.
His appeal was accepted by one court, but a second in Medina upheld his
death sentence again in March 2010, stating that he deserved it as he
had publicly practised sorcery in front of millions of viewers for
several years.
In November 2010, the Supreme Court refused to ratify the death
sentence, stating that there was insufficient evidence that his actions
had harmed others.
On 12 December 2011, Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was beheaded in
Al Jawf Province after being convicted of practicing witchcraft and sorcery. Another very similar situation occurred to Muree bin Ali bin Issa al-Asiri and he was beheaded on 19 June 2012 in the
Najran Province.
ISIS (Islamic State)
On 29 and 30 June 2015, militants of the
radical Islam terrorist group
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) beheaded two couples on accusations of sorcery and using "magic for medicine" in
Deir ez-Zor province of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Earlier on, the ISIL militants beheaded several "magicians" and street illusionists in Syria, Iraq and Libya.
Figurative use of the term
Western media frequently write of a '
Stalinist witch-hunt' or a '
McCarthyite witch-hunt, In these cases, the word 'witch-hunt' is used as a
metaphor to illustrate the brutal and ruthless way in which political opponents are denigrated and persecuted.
