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Frank: And I think you have a tendency to overcomplicate a subject, and it appears (at least to me) that you have a history of this any time religion is on the chopping block.

My tendency to look for complexity certainly isn't limited to religious topics, and if you're only seeing it there, maybe that's because this forum hardly ever deals with history or current events unless it does pertain to the supposed evils of religion. I don't see how you can ignore the fact of complexity when you're dealing with events that involve hundreds of individuals (counting only the most prominent), different cultures, and hundreds (or thousands) of years. I can certainly see why you'd consider simplicity convenient, but that it would be convenient to reduce historical fact to basic, simple motives and causes doesn't mean that it's realistic to do so.

Human motivations have not changed much since the beginning of recorded history so I would argue that current motivations would also be common in the past, just as I would argue that past motivations are still common today.

Some human motivations have not changed much, but I'd say that the fact of different cultural and physical environments does a hell of a lot to change the way those motivations develop and express themselves.

Then how do you explain the studies that show that more secular societies are more tolerant and fair?

I'm not at all convinced that a) the correlation is how you'd prefer to see it (ie. the societies are secular, therefore they are more tolerant), of b) that the definition of secular is the same as we're using it. What part of the society is secular in those cases? The administrative branch of society, or the members of society themselves?


When did I say conceal? Please try to get my accusations correct. I stated that (from my observations) you would (nearly always) favor a secular position when one is available, even if a religious one is more obvious or even more likely.

No, what you stated was that I probably would not mention relevant evidence, which sounds a hell of a lot like you're accusing me of concealing evidence that doesn't favor my argument. "And I doubt that he would mention that there were texts circulating that implied that most witches would be female."

But whatever. Feel free to defend yourself on that point. I don't plan to nitpick over it.

me: I want to finish up the book I'm reading now, and maybe make a foray into one other book on the subject (which will, hopefully, clear up some questions I have about how witch-persecutions were handled prior to the 16th century)
Mr P.: You gunna share which books you are reading or not?

The book I'm (still) finishing up is Julio Caro Baroja's "The World of the Witches". It isn't as in depth as Trevor-Roper, and I think that some of Baroja's conclusions are a bit dismissive, but it's interesting all the same, not least of all because he focusses on witchcraft in the Basque region of Spain in the later third of the book. The other book I have on deck is "Witchcraft in the Middle Ages" by Jeffrey Burton Russell, which I'm hoping will clear up some of the questions I have concerning witchcraft between the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Renaissance period. But my personal life has been keeping me busy lately, so I'm not making much progress on the topic.

Regarding the whole topic of why women were targeted...just something I have been considering...do you think it could have something to do with the fact that the devil is generally considered a male...and that intercourse was such a factor in liasons amongst witches and satan?

Well, one way to address that possibility would be to see whether or not medieval witches prior to the witch-crazes were typically female. The association of witch-craft with the Christian devil was a contemporary development, so that association wouldn't have been at play prior to about the 15th or 16th century. Classical witches were typically female, and there the situation was reversed, since the pagan divinities associated with classical witch-craft were almost always female. That doesn't mean that the association with a specifically male devil couldn't have led to the same result in the Renaissance period, though.

On the whole, I'd say we're better off rephrasing the female question. That witches were more often than not female is traditional, not only within the Judeo-Christian tradition but within any number of pagan traditions as well. That gender preference wasn't something new to the period. So I think we could profitably break the question down into two related questions: 1) Why have witches traditionally been female, both within and without the Judeo-Christian scriptural traditions (and are the reasons the same)? and 2) Was gender bias one of the reasons that witch persecutions took off during this particular period?

As for why women were more often the accusers, there's an interesting (though not fully developed) suggestion in Baroja's book. In examining outbreaks of witch-suppression in rural regions of Spain, he notes that in the general area women were typically the dominant force, in large part because most of the men were involved in maritime trade which kept them away from their families for the better part of the year. In fact, I'll have to check my dates on this, but the outbreak of witch-persecutions seem to coincide with the rise of maritime exploration in Europe. It would be interesting to see the results of a sociological study that compared the incidence of witch accusations with the dispersion of sailors leaving entire towns in the care of their wives.

Yes, absolutely, but maybe your terms should not be the only considerations?

I'd rather they not be. What I'd like is for us to have a dialogue about the terms and arrive at some sort of compromise. Accusations like the one Frank has brought up here only get in the way of that.

But religion is defined as an adherence to a specific tradition or canon.

That's a useful way of identifying religions, but it has limited usefulness in looking at religious over periods of development, for the simple reason that religious traditions and canons aren't static. Our discussion provides a very useful example. The prohibition against witch belief and witch persecution was part of the Christian tradition for more than 800 years. So when we talk about the witch-crazes of the 16th century, are we talking about a different religion from the one that didn't persecute witches in the 9th century?

The issue, as I understand it, isn't the question of "is this a religion" or "is that a secular institution". I'm taking it for granted that a religious institution can act for secular reasons, and vice versa. Rather it's the question of how we can discern which actions are really religiously motivated, regardless of the pious lip service that may attend them. "Adherence to a specific tradition or canon" can be misleading in such cases, just as it can be misleading to take a politician at his word when he says he has the good of the people in mind.

It is an entity that grows off of what it's adherents feed it. Good and bad.

Absolutely, and my understanding is that the state of the Church that allowed it to facilitate the witch crazes was attained in large part by the political gerrymandering it underwent in the 1000 odd years that preceeded the witch-crazes.

By this definiton, you exclude any natural human motivation and purge religion of ANY chance of doing wrong.

In the first case, maybe. The fact is, depending on what you mean by "natural", religion isn't necessary to any of the "natural human motivations". So I think it's proper to exclude those are specifically religious motivations. If a person uses religion as a way to secure shelter or food, I'd say they're acting for secular ends. Just to illustrate, consider the example of a missionary distributing food in a non-Christian nation. The natives may adopt Christianity if they think it will secure them some food during the famine they're undergoing, but would you say that the missionary has good reason to trust in their newfound faith?

As for securing it from the chance of doing ANY wrong doing, I don't think that's the case. From our perspective, I think we'd agree that it's immoral to sacrafice another human, even if the people involved believe that will secure them some measure of transcendence. And I'm not so relativistic to argue away our moral perspective on that matter. In the case of a culture like the Aztecs, who might have been able to profitably convert their prisoners of war into a slave work force, the decision to sacrafice them by the boatload instead seems to be good reason for supposing that their motivation was religious rather than secular.

It's the cases in which there are clear secular benefits that I think it's worthwhile to question the traditional (Enlightenment) logic that says that people routinely commit mass atrocities simply because the Bible tells them (or can be used to tell them) to do so.

Even if there is a facade of good intention (saving their souls), the fact is that, with the major religions, there is intrinsically something wrong with the 'other'.

Not intrinsically, and there have been a number of instances of society-wide tolerance between the major religious traditions. And I think it's worthwhile to examine the differences between those cultures and the cultures which, ostensibly, share the same religious values, but which do not make a policy of religious tolerance.

me: My answer is that the hard division between a natural and supernatural world is a relatively recent fixture, one that was apparantly suggested by Enlightenment atheists
Mr. P: Uhm...I cannot chew this. The hard division is spelled out quite clearly in the first book of the bible (torah) and it was probably worked out well before that.

Can you point me to the passage that makes that distinction? It certainly isn't one I'm familiar with, and if anything, I'd say that the Torah plays more loosely with the distinction between natural and supernatural than does just about any other part of the Bible.

me: In other words, it isn't that religious believers posit the existence of a world in addition to the natural world, but that they view the natural world as a compartment of a larger scheme.
Mr. P: This is semantics.

For us, arguing the subject as though it were wholly abstract, it may be semantic, but for someone who actually believes that way, I'd say it's a good deal more than that. Just to give an example of how it might affect a person's thinking, take two religious believers, one a theologically-minded person (Ted) who makes a strong distinction between the natural world and the supernatural, and another person (Steve) who (probably unconsciously) regards the "natural" world as a compartment of a unified world that encompasses both the divine and the mundane. Ted would probably view miracles as a breach of the established order, and would therefore be much more skeptical of any particular claims regarding the miraculous, whereas Steve would view miracles as a reasonable occurence in a world where the line between God and Creation isn't that strictly drawn.

And again I will have to point out that speaking of a "heaven and earth" refer to separate places, whether a compartment or tangent to each other.

As places, yes, but it doesn't necessarily imply that they're different categories of existence. Medieval cosmology viewed heaven as a physical place that it would be possible to reach if one could travel through the aether long enough and far enough. Ancient Israelite cosmology also presented the heavens as a physical place continuous with the world we apprehend directly.

And it is this matter of thinking that keeps things ambiguous and dangerous...and allow for fanciful thinking and myth to have us behaving in despicable ways. "Whether or not that...view is correct" is kind of an important fact to some of us.

It should be, if we're dealing with the quesiton of whether or not to believe that view. But we haven't been. We've been talking about whether or not that view is operative in a particular historical occurence, and for that purpose, it isn't terribly important whether or not it's correct.

I think that the entirety of the witch craze was BASED on the centuries of religious thought that made up the various Christian faiths..and thus that enabled this event to occur and to last. Were there other motivations? Yes, but the fog of religion and the tenets of that religion was a catalyst that made this worse than it could have been. Without the need to really find justification, there was an appeal to credulity to sell this crusade.

And I think, ultimately, we're probably not going to get past that in discussion. You've got a particular view of what happened, and I don't think you're likely to amend it.

For my part, I don't think the "appeal to credulity" is decisive. That there was such an appeal I'll readily admit -- there were hellfire-and-brimstone preachers spreading the good word about witch burnin'. But the fact that they did so doesn't prove that their having said so was the cause. Not even the fact that they were cited by others as justification proves as much. There probably were people who were zealous enough to fall in line with whatever was being preached, but I doubt they made up the majority. The cui bono? question comes into play again, and I think the evidence makes it pretty clear that the Church was not the only one who stood to gain here, nor even necessarily the primary beneficiary.

We cannot carve out the good religion may do and say 'this is true religion' and carve out the bad and say 'well, this may look like religion, but it may indeed be something else'.

If that's what you think I'm trying to do, then you're either misreading what I've written, or I'm not explaining my position well enough.

me: For starters, we can say that it isn't acting from its explicit motivation: the salvation of individual souls.
Mr. P: But that is a motivation that is arbitrary. Who says that is THE motivation of such a general term as 'religion'.

Arbitrary in what sense? That is the mission of the Church, as the Church describes it. I'm not reading anything into Christian religion here; I'm repeating what the Church has always taught was its explicit mission.

But as I said, the social & political were very tied in with the religion of the time.

The institutions were, yes; but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to isolate certain actions as political and certain actions as religious. Very few Moors in Spain converted to Christianity for religious reasons: they did so in order to avoid exile and persecution. The English didn't start planting turnips for religious reasons, but because it was economically prudent to do so. If you want to argue that, because the institutions onvolved in these actions were religious, and therefore we're incapable of identifying the actions as motivated by secular concerns, be my guest, but I think that makes the whole distinction between religious and secular practically unusable.

Were the common folk honestly concerned that there were witches next door, or did they realize this was a socio-political thing? Did they know the difference?

Some did. There are tracts arguing as much; ie. that the people being persecuted weren't actually witches, that they were being chosen for prejudicial reasons, so on and so forth. To what degree the general population adhered to either set of beliefs, it's impossible to say. They simply didn't leave much evidence of how they felt or believed. The fact that the witch master generals constantly felt compelled to argue for witch belief, and to condemn those who didn't believe in witches or support the witch trials, would seem to indicate that it wasn't uniformly accepted by the populace, but that still leaves us shy of any hard statistical numbers.

I do not define acceptance of scientific findings with the term creduilty. I think that is a stretch.

Why is it a stretch? I hear people talk all the time about scientific findings that they accept as steel-hard fact, despite having only heard about it on CNN. They aren't accepting them because they have any empirical reason to do so; they're simply credulous of any information that appears to come from a reputable scientist. What, precisely, do you mean by credulity that would insulate scientific belief altogether?

The more sources I check on Witchcraft, the more I am seeing the Cathars around. I read something recently (I was perusing and forgot the source at this specific moment) even suggested somewhat of a tie to the witch craze.

There are ties, but it doesn't seem at all clear to me that the witch crazes were a covert way of hunting the Cathari. The biggest tie is historical -- the Dominicans who defined Enlightenment era witchcraft and wrote the procedures for persecuting it had trained by trying the Cathari for heresy. That also happens to be the biggest reason why I doubt that the witch-crazes were targetted at the Cathari -- the Inquisition didn't need an excuse to bring Cathars to trial.

That the dualism of the Cathar sect, influenced by Manichaeism, helped to solidify the later accoutrements of witchcraft: the pact with the devil and the idea of sexual liasons between witches and the devil.

There probably was some influence in this regard. It looks to me as though, in interrogating the Cathari, the Inquisitors who defined 16th century witchcraft acquainted themselves with Manichean ideas that could be applied as a way of understanding witch-craft within the Christian scheme. Its adoption probably should have been regarded by the Church as a form of heresy; but the Dominicans were, by that time, pulling too much weight.

It was also metioned that the remnants of the Cathars, fleeing the Crusade launched against them, moved into the areas where the witch hunts really got going.

Heresy seems to have been endemic in the mountainous regions -- the Pyranees, the Basques, etc. The Inquisitors had moved into those regions specifically to deal with the "traditional" heresies (Waldensian and Cathari), but I don't know of any evidence that would suggest that the normal Inquisitorial procedure led directly to the development of something like the Malleus. Even knowing the heretical background, it still seems odd to me that some of the Inquisitors started turning their attention to witch-craft, instead of sticking to what worked. In doing so, they set a new precedent, one that wasn't really necessary if they point was to expunge Europe of heresy. They already had the Church's support in doing that, so why make a point of requesting the Church's support in rooting out something as ridiculous (and prior to the 16th century, the Church did consider it ridiculous) as witchcraft?