Jewish Voice for Labour Sends Report on Real Labour Anti-Semitism to EHRC and Forde Enquiry

Starmer’s continuing purge of the Labour left, and especially left-wing Jews critical of Israel, is meeting resistance. As Mike put up yesterday, Pamela Fitzpatrick has put the bargain basement Stalin on notice that she may take legal action against the Labour party for her ‘autoexclusion’. Starmer wants to expel because last year she gave an interview to Socialist Appeal, one of the four groups he wants to expel from the Labour party. But this was at a time when Socialist Appeal was still perfectly acceptable. This is retroactive justice, the criminalisation of individuals and groups for actions that were perfectly legal at the time they were committed. It’s a hallmark of tyrannies and dictatorships from Nazi Germany to Stalin’s Russia, as Fitzpatrick herself has pointed out. She tweeted

I am starting to wonder, given my line of work, as to whether the practice of introducing laws with retrospective effect, the presumption of guilt until proven innocent, the denial of appeal rights and lack of fair process is to be future Labour policy for our justice system.

This is, of course, grossly hypocritical coming from Starmer. As Steve Sammut pointed out, between 1986 and 1988 Starmer was editor of Socialist Alternatives, a magazine published by the International Marxist Tendency. Labour Party Marxists are another group Starmer has decided to expel, despite the fact that, unlike Militant Tendency in the 1980s, I’ve seen zero evidence that they are an entryist group trying to take over the party. Indeed, many of the socialist societies that came together to form the Labour party were either Marxist or Marxist influenced. And when the scandal about Militant hit Labour in the 1980s, the Swedish Social Democrats responded by saying that they had absolutely no problem with the Marxists remaining in their party, providing that they didn’t engage in those tactics. These tactics, used to subvert democracy in the party, have been taken over and applied wholesale by the real entryists, the Blairites now headed by Starmer and David Evans in the NEC.

And let’s be clear – this is an inquisition. Starmer is actually using the language used by the Christian and Roman Catholic church to excommunicate heretics. The concept of ‘autoexclusion’ was devised in the fourth century to justify the excommunication of the Donatist schismatics of north Africa. The argument was that the Church isn’t excommunicating them. Rather they are excommunicating themselves through their beliefs and actions. It’s a doctrine that isn’t confined to the sphere of religion, however. Andre Breton, the ‘Pope of Surrealism’, used it when he wanted to throw dissident artists out of his artistic movement. His victims included a group of Christian artists interested in using the techniques of Surrealism to explore their religion, which caused the militant Marxist atheist to go berserk.

But Jewish Voice for Labour are also showing the real anti-Semitism behind these purges.

They have just submitted a report to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the ongoing Forde Inquiry showing that the vast majority of the witch hunt are Jews. Four out of five of those accused of anti-Semitism are Jewish. If we had a decent media in this country, this would be reported and more than demonstrate that these accusations have nothing to do with real anti-Semitism. Instead, it’s all about protecting Israel and presenting the Board of Deputies as the real representatives of Britain’s very diverse Jewish community. Of course, the Board are nothing of the sort. Tony Greenstein and other great Jewish activists and bloggers have demonstrated that the Board really represent only the United Synagogue, who seem to be the Jewish members of the Conservative party at prayer, just as the old adage said that the Anglican Church is for Christians.

Mike reports that JVL’s statement, submitted on the 24th August 2021, runs

“We have become aware of seven new investigations of Jewish Party members. Notifications of new investigations and auto-exclusions are arriving on a daily basis.

“This means it would appear that over four times more Jewish than non-Jewish Labour Party members have faced actioned complaints of antisemitism.  The disproportion is even greater in relation to JVL Committee members and officers. The staggering numbers suggest that these Jews are nearly three hundred times more likely to be investigated than non- Jewish Labour Party members. In all these cases the charges of so-called antisemitism are deeply offensive.

“Dozens of Jewish members are now being targeted by Labour as antisemites, for voicing an understanding of antisemitism that is a direct product of our Jewish political and personal heritage.

“The effect of rejecting or ignoring complaints made by JVL members of antisemitism; our experience of bullying and harassment; and the refusal to consult or involve JVL in, for instance, the EHRC required Action Plan; all show disdain for our status and roles as Jews.”

Their personal understanding of real anti-Semitism appears to me to be absolutely incontrovertible and corresponds to what the founders of modern anti-Semitism actually said. Slugs like the Austrian anti-Semitic politico, Carl von Schoenerer, stated that they hated Jews simply for being Jews. Their religion or other opinions were immaterial. Indeed, there was a nasty little rhyme they sang that said that Judaism wasn’t the issue. The ‘swinishness’ was in the blood. This is quite different from the verbose, convoluted and extremely flawed definition of anti-Semitism formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and used to chill criticism of Israel, as one of its authors, Kenneth Stern, has admitted.

And Jewish Labour members like Andrew Feinstein have pointed out the massive injustice in smearing decent, anti-racist Jews as anti-Semites when so many of them have been personally affected by the Holocaust. He regards their persecution by a reactionary Labour party leadership as indefensible.

And he’s right. I’ve read that half of the British Jewish population lost family members in the Shoah. And the victims of the NEC’s and now Starmer’s witch hunt has included proud, decent Jews, who have personally experience anti-Semitic abuse and violence, as well as anti-racist gentiles who have also suffered the same for their activism in support of the Jewish community.

The overwhelming preponderance of Jews as victims of the anti-Semitism witch hunt should absolutely put the lie to any claim that these people are really self-hating and anti-Semitic.

This is all about silencing criticism of Israel, and particularly Jewish critics, because their simple existence refutes the lies and propaganda by Netanyahu and his British supporters that all Jews everywhere are proud Israelis, and that the British Jewish community uncritically supports Israel.

And the witch-hunt against left-wing Jews in the Labour party is part of a strain of political anti-Semitism stretching back to the wretched Protocols of the Elders of Zion. One of the accusations levelled by the right against their opponents on the left is that they follow the classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by confusing Jews with capitalism and the control of the government and the economy. But the Protocols of the Elders of Zion also claimed that Jews were also responsible for socialism and communism. A little while ago I blogged about a letter from Craig Ferguson published by the JVL at their site, which pointed out that British anti-Semitism was originally targeted at left-wing Jews. The British newspaper magnate who published the Protocols in the 1920s himself drew a distinction between loyal, patriotic British Jews, and radical, communist Jewish immigrants flooding in from the continent. The witch-hunters clearly seem to be guided by that kind of anti-Semitism in their attacks on JVL. The Labour MP Neil Coyle even called for their expulsion along with other ‘commies’.

And Michelle Laufer clearly showed Starmer’s personal hypocrisy in targeting entirely decent left-wing Jews considering his own dismal record of lies and intriguing as party leader in this tweet:

I’ve just heard Starmer on the radio saying he and Labour need to be honest with the British public so they can learn to trust the Labour party again. As a Jewish member of the Labour party who has had to watch other Jewish members abused, suspended and expelled as anti-
Semitism has been weaponised, I’d like to know if he’s going to be honest about this. Is he going to be honest about the fraudulent way he in which he became leader, his broken pledges, the gerrymandering of Party democracy, the silencing of members of criticise apartheid Israel, his fawning obedience to the Board of Deputies who do not represent the views of the majority of Jews in this country and the imposition of antisemitism training by the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement.

Well no, of course Keef Stalin isn’t. He’s an authoritarian liar, and this would destroy him and the other Thatcherite entryists driving this witch-hunt, as well as his attempts to ingratiate himself with all those Tory voters out there.

Mike concludes his article with these comments

And the problem isn’t anti-Semites; it’s him – and the entryists who are supporting him because they know falsely accusing Labour socialists (the people for whom the party was originally created) of a heinous offence will make the party unelectable, leaving the way clear for the Tory corruption that we have seen under Boris Johnson.

I think it’s just a matter of time until this particular house of cards comes crashing down around Starmer and his allies.

I hope so. And I hope it brings down everyone else who was involved in this vicious vilification and persecution of decent people, including David Evans and the woefully misnamed Jewish Labour Movement.

Review of Book on New Atheist Myths Now Up on Magonia Review Blog

The Magonia Review of Books blog is one of the online successors to the small press UFO journal, Magonia, published from the 1980s to the early part of this century. The Magonians took the psycho-social view of encounters with alien entities. This holds that they are essentially internal, psychological events which draw on folklore and the imagery of space and Science Fiction. Following the ideas of the French astronomer and computer scientist, Jacques Vallee, and the American journalist, John Keel, they also believed that UFO and other entity encounters were also part of the same phenomenon that had created fairies and other supernatural beings and events in the past. The magazine thus examined other, contemporary forms of vision and belief, such as the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare in the 1990s. It also reviewed books dealing with wide range of religious and paranormal topics. These included not just UFOs, but also the rise of apocalyptic religious faith in America, conspiracy theories, ghosts and vampires, cryptozoology and the Near Death Experience, for example. Although the magazine is no longer in print, the Magonia Review of Books continues reviewing books, and sometimes films, on the paranormal and is part of a group of other blogs, which archive articles from the magazine and its predecessor, the Merseyside UFO Bulletin (MUFOB), as well as news of other books on the subject.

I’ve had a number of articles published in Magonia and reviews on the Review of Books. The blog has just put my review of Nathan Johnstone’s The New Atheism, Myth and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion (Palgrave MacMillan 2018).  The book is a critical attack on the abuse of history by New Atheist polemicists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and so on to attack religion. He shows that the retail extremely inaccurate accounts of historical atrocities like the witch hunts and persecution of heretics by the Christian church and the savage anti-religious campaign in the Soviet Union in order to condemn religion on the one hand, and try to show that atheism was not responsible for the atrocities committed in its name on the other. At the same time he is alarmed by the extremely vitriolic language used by Dawkins and co. about the religious. He draws comparisons between it and the language used to justify persecution in the past to warn that it too could have brutal consequences despite its authors’ commitment to humanity and free speech.

The article is at: http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2019/10/believing-in-not-believing-new-atheists.html if you wish to read it at the Magonia Review site. I’ve also been asked to reblog it below. Here it is.

Nathan Johnstone. The New Atheism, Myth and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion. Palgrave Macmillan 2018.

The New Atheists is a term coined to described the group of militant atheists that emerged after the shock of 9/11. Comprising the biologist Richard Dawkins, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, the philosophers Daniel C. Dennett and A.C. Grayling, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the astronomer Victor Stenger, and others, they are known for their particularly bitter invective against all forms of religion. The above claim to stand for reason and science against irrationality and unreason. But while they are especially protective of science, and who gets to speak for it or use its findings, they are cavalier regarding theology and the humanities, including history.

Johnstone is appalled by this attitude. Instead of respecting history and its scholarship, he compares Dawkins, Harris et al to hunter-gatherers. They are not interested in exploring history, but rather using it as a grab-bag of examples of atrocities committed by the religious. In so doing they ignore what historians really say about the events and periods they cite, and retail myth as history. These he regards as a kind of ‘Black Legend’ of theism, using the term invented in the early twentieth century by the Spanish historian Julian Juderas to describe a type of anti-Spanish, anti-Roman Catholic polemic. He states his book is intended to be just a defence of history, and takes no stance on the issue of the existence of God. From his use of ‘we’ in certain points to describe atheists and Humanists, it could be concluded that Johnstone is one of the many of the latter, who are appalled by the New Atheists’ venom.

One such religious doubter was the broadcaster John Humphries,  the author of the defence of agnosticism, In God We Doubt. Humphries stated in the blurb for the book that he considered himself an agnostic before moving to atheism. Then he read one of the New Atheist texts and was so shocked by it he went back to being an agnostic. The group first made its debut several years ago now, and although New Atheism has lost some of its initial interest and support, they’re still around.

Hence Johnstone’s decision to publish this book. While Dawkins’ The God Delusion was published almost a decade ago, the New Atheists are still very much around. They and their followers are still on the internet, and their books on the shelves at Waterstones. Dawkins published his recent work of atheist polemics, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide a few weeks ago at the beginning of October 2019. He accompanied its publication with an appearance at Cheltenham Literary Festival, where he was speaking about why everyone should turn atheist.

The events and the atrocities cited by the New Atheists as demonstrations of the intrinsic evil of religion are many, including the Inquisitions, the witch-hunts, anti-Semitism, the Crusades, the subjugation of women, colonialism, the slave trade and the genocide of the Indians, to which they also add human sacrifice, child abuse, censorship, sexual repression and resistance to science. These are too many to tackle in one book, and it confines itself instead to attacking and refuting New Atheist claims about the witch-hunts, the medieval persecution of heretics, and the question of whether Hitler was ever really Christian and the supposed Christian origins of Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.

The book also tackles historical movements and figures, that the New Atheists have claimed as atheist heroes and forerunners – the ancient Greek Atomists and two opponents of the witch-hunts, Dietrich Flade and Friedrich Spee. It then moves on to examine Sam Harris’ endorsement of torture in the case of Islamist terrorists and atheist persecution in the former Soviet Union before considering the similarity of some New Atheist attitudes to that of religious believers. It concludes with an attack on the dangerous rhetoric of the New Atheists which vilifies and demonises religious believers, rhetoric which could easily provoke persecution, even if its authors themselves are humane men who don’t advocate it.

Johnstone traces these atheist myths back to their nineteenth and pre-nineteenth century origins, and some of the books cited by the New Atheists as the sources for their own writings. One of the most influential of these is Charles MacKay’s 1843 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In many instances he shows them to be using very dated, and now refuted texts. With some of the modern works they also draw on, examination shows that often they ignore the authors’ own conclusions, which may differ considerably, or even be the complete opposite of their own.

In the case of the witch-hunts, Johnstone traces the oft-quoted figure of over nine million victims to an early nineteenth century German author, Gottfried Christian Voigt, who extrapolated it from the murder of the thirty witches executed in his home town of Quedlinburg from 1569 to 1683. He assumed this was typical of all areas throughout the period of the witch-hunts. The figure was picked up by the radical neo-Pagan and feminist movements of the 1970s. But it’s false. The real figure, he claims, was 50,000. And its intensity varied considerably from place to place and over time. The Portuguese Inquisition, for example, only killed one witch c. 1627. In other places, the inquisitors were conscientious in giving the accused a fair trial. Convictions for witchcraft were overturned and evidence was taken to prove the accused’s innocence as well as guilt. The Roman Inquisition also demanded the accused to provide a list of their enemies, as their testimony would obviously be suspect.

In regions where the discussion of witchcraft had resulted in the mass trial and execution of the innocent, the religious authorities imposed silence about the subject. Johnstone rebuts the statement of some Christian apologists that the Church was only complicit in these atrocities, not responsible for them. But he shows that they were an anomaly. Nearly all societies have believed in the existence of witches throughout history, but the period of witch-hunting was very limited. The problem therefore is not that religion and belief in the supernatural leads inexorably to persecution, but how to explain that it doesn’t.

He shows that the Church moved from a position of initial scepticism towards full scale belief over a period of centuries. The witch-hunts arose when maleficium – black magic – became linked to heresy, and so became a kind of treason. As an example of how secular and political motives were also involved in the denunciations and trials, rather than just pure religious hatred, he cites the case of the priest Urbain Grandier. Grandier’s case was the basis for Aldous Huxley’s novel, The Devils of Loudoun, which was filmed by Ken Russell as The Devils. Here it appears the motives for the trial were political, as Grandier had been an opponent of the French minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Johnstone also considers that as secular societies have also persecuted those they consider to be politically or morally deviant there exists in humanity a need to persecute. This means finding and identifying an anti-group, directly opposed to conventional society, whose existence and opposition demonstrates the value of that society.

KEN RUSSELL’S ‘THE DEVILS’ (1971)

The medieval persecution of heretics may also have been due to a number of causes and not simply due to the malign attitudes of religious believers. There was a period of nearly 700 years between the execution of the Roman heretic, Priscillian, in the fourth century and the revival of persecution the early eleventh. This arose in the context of the emergence and development of states and the expansion of papal and royal power, which involved church and crown extending their power over local communities. At the same time, the papacy attempted reforming the church, at first in response to popular demand. However, it was then faced with the problem of clamping down on some of the popular reform movements when they threatened to run out of its control.

As the case of the Waldensians shows, the line between orthodoxy and heresy could be an extremely fine one. Johnstone also raises the question here of whether one of the most notorious medieval heretical groups, the Cathars, ever existed at all. It is possible that their existence is an illusion created by the categories of heresies the inquisitors had inherited from the Church Fathers. These were forced onto a group of local communities in the Languedoc, where popular piety centred around the Good Men and Women. These were highly respected members of the community, who were believed to live exemplary Christian lives. They were therefore due proper respect, which to the inquisitors looked like heretical veneration.

Hitler’s Christianity is also highly debatable. The little reliable testimony states that he was indeed Roman Catholic, but doesn’t provide any evidence of a deep faith. He certainly at times claimed he was a Christian and was acting in accordance with his religious beliefs. But an examination of some of these quotes shows that they were uttered as a rebuttal to others, who stated that their Christian beliefs meant that they could not support Nazism. This raises the question of whether they were anything more than a rhetorical gesture. There is evidence that Hitler was an atheist with a particular hatred of Christianity. This is mostly drawn from his Table Talk, and specifically the English edition produced by Hugh Trevor-Roper. The atheist polemicist, Richard Carrier, has shown that it is derived from a French language version, whose author significantly altered some of the quotes to insert an atheist meaning where none was present in the original. However, Carrier only identified a handful of such quotes, leaving forty requiring further investigation. Thus the question remains undecided.

Johnstone also examine the Nazi persecution of the Jews from the point of view of the theorists of political religion. These consider that humans are innately religious, but that once secularisation has broken the hold of supernatural religion, the objects of veneration changes to institutions like the state, free market capitalism, the New Man, Communism and so on. Those who follow this line differ in the extent to which they believe that the Nazis were influenced by religion. Some view it as a hydra, whose many heads stood for Christianity, but also Paganism in the case of Himmler and the SS. But underneath, the source of the real religious cult was the race, the nation and Hitler himself. If these theorists are correct, then Nazism may have been the result, not of a continued persecuting Christianity, but of secularisation.

He also considers the controversial view of the German historian, Richard Steigmann-Gall, whose The Holy Reich considered that the Nazis really were sincere in their Christianity. This has been criticised because some of the Nazis it examines as examples of Nazi Christian piety, like Rudolf Hess, were minor figures in the regime, against vehement anti-Christians like Alfred Rosenberg. He also shows how the peculiar views of the German Christians, the Nazi Christian sect demanding a new, Aryan Christianity, where Christ was blond and blue-eyed, and the Old Testament was to be expunged from the canon, were similar to certain trends within early twentieth century liberal Protestantism. But the German historian’s point in writing the book was not simply to put culpability for the Nazis’ horrors on Christianity. He wanted to attack the comfortable distance conventional society places between itself and the Nazis, in order to reassure people that they couldn’t have committed such crimes because the Nazis were different. His point was that they weren’t. They were instead uncomfortably normal.

DEMOCRITUS

The New Atheists celebrate the ancient Greek Atomists because their theories that matter is made up of tiny irreducible particles, first put forward by the philosophers Epicurus and Democritus, seem so similar to modern atomic theory. These ancient philosophers believed that these alone were responsible for the creation of a number of different worlds and the creatures that inhabited them by chance.

Some of these were forms that were incapable of surviving alone, and so died out. Thus, they appear to foreshadow Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. New Atheist writers bitterly attack Aristotle, whose own rival theories of matter and physics gained ascendancy until Atomism was revived in the seventeenth century. The natural philosophers behind its revival are credited with being atheists, even though many of them were Christians and one, Pierre Gassendi, a Roman Catholic priest. Their Christianity is thus seen as nominal. One also takes the extreme view that Galileo’s prosecution was due to his embrace of the atomic theory, rather than his argument that the Earth moved around the Sun.

But scholars have shown that the ancient atomic theory grew out of particular debates in ancient Greece about the fundamental nature of matter, and cannot be removed from that context. They were very different to modern atomic theory. At the same time, they also held beliefs that are to us nonsense as science. For example, they believed that the early creatures produced by atoms were fed by the Earth with a milk-like substance. They also believed in the fixity of species. Even where they did believe in evolution, in the case of humanity, this was more Lamarckian than Darwinian. Aristotle’s views won out over theirs not because of religious narrow-mindedness or ignorance, but because Aristotle’s had great explanatory power.

The scientists, who revived it in the seventeenth century, including Boyle and Newton, were sincere Christians. They believed that atoms created objects through divine agency because the ancient Greek explanation – it was all chance without a theory of momentum – genuinely couldn’t explain how this could occur without God. As for Galileo, the historian who first suggested this extreme and largely discredited view, believed that he was a victim of papal politics, and that there had also been a party within the Vatican and the Church, which supported his theories.

Discussing the two witch-hunters celebrated by the New Atheists as atheist, or at least, Sceptical heroes, the book shows that this was not the case. Dietrich Flade seems to have been accused because he had fallen out with an ecclesiastical rival, Zandt, for being too lenient on the accused witches. But he also appears to have been protected by the church authorities until the accusations of witchcraft by accused witches became too many to ignore.

The other Sceptical hero, Friedrich Spee, was a Jesuit priest, who became convinced of the innocence of those accused of witchcraft through attending so many to the stake. He then wrote a book condemning the trials, the Cautio Crimenalis. But he was no sceptic. He believed wholeheartedly in witchcraft, but considered it rare. The use of torture was wrong, as it was leading to false confessions and false denunciations of others, which could not be retracted for fear of further torture. Thus the souls of the innocent were damned for this sin. But while good Christians were being burned as witches, many of the witch-hunters themselves were in league with Satan. They used the hunts and baseless accusations to destroy decent Christian society and charity.

But if the New Atheists are keen to ascribe a wide number of historical atrocities to religion without recognising the presence of other, social and political factors, they deny any such crimes can be attributed to atheism. Atheism is defined as a lack of belief in God, and so cannot be responsible for inspiring horrific acts. Johnstone states that in one sense, this is true, but it is also a question about the nature of the good life and the good society that must be constructed in the absence of a belief in God. And these become positive ideologies that are responsible for horrific crimes.

Johnstone goes on from this to attack Hector Avelos’ statement that the Soviet persecution of the Church was only a form of anti-clericalism, which all societies must go through. Johnstone rebuts this by describing the process and extent of Soviet persecution, from the separation of church and state in 1917 to the imposition of atheism by force. Churches and monasteries were closed and religious objects seized and desecrated, religious believers arrested, sent to the gulags or massacred. These persecutions occurred in cycles, and there were times, such as during the War, when a rapprochement was made with the Orthodox Church. But these periods of toleration were always temporary and established for entirely pragmatic and utilitarian purposes.

The goal was always the creation of an atheist state, and they were always followed, until the fall of Communism, by renewed persecution. The wartime rapprochement with the Church was purely to gain the support of believers for the campaign against the invading Nazis. It was also to establish state control through the church on Orthodox communities that had survived, or reappeared in border areas under Nazi occupation. Finally, the attack on the clergy, church buildings and religious objects and even collectivisation itself were done with the deliberate intention of undermining religious ritual and practice, which was considered the core of Orthodox life and worship.

Sam Harris has become particularly notorious for his suggestion that atheists should be trusted to torture terrorist suspects because of their superior rationality and morality compared to theists. Harris believed it was justified in the case of al-Qaeda suspects in order to prevent further attacks. But here Johnstone shows his logic was profoundly flawed. Torture was not introduced into medieval judicial practice in the twelfth century through bloodthirsty and sadistic ignorance. Rather it was intended as a reasonable alternative to the ordeal. Human reason, and the acquisition of evidence, was going to be sufficient to prove guilt or innocence without relying on supposed divine intervention. But the standards of evidence required were very high, and in the case of a crime like witchcraft, almost impossible without a confession.

The use of torture was initially strictly limited and highly regulated, but the sense of crisis produced by witchcraft resulted in the inquisitors abandoning these restraints. Similarly, Harris’ fear of terror attacks leads him to move from reasonable suspects, who may well be guilty, to those who are simply members of terrorist organisations. They are fitting subjects for torture because although they may be innocent of a particular offence, through their membership of a terrorist organisation or adherence to Islamist beliefs, they must be guilty of something. Finally, Harris also seems to see Islamism as synonymous with Islam, so that all Muslims everywhere are seen as enemies of the secular Western order. This is exactly the same logic as that which motivated the witch-hunts, in which witches were seen as the implacable enemies of Christian society, and so exempt from the mercy and humane treatment extended to other types of criminal.

From this Johnstone then goes on to consider how the New Atheists’ image of atheism and the process of abandoning belief in God resembles religious attitudes. Their belief that atheism must be guarded against the dangers of falling back into religious belief mirrors Christian fears of the temptation to false belief, such as those of the Protestant reformers towards the persistence of Roman Catholicism. At the same time, their ideas of abandoning God and so attaining the truth resembles the Christian process of conversion and membership of the elect. And the vitriol directed at the religious for continuing to believe in God despite repeated demonstrations of His nonexistence resembles the inquisitors’ attitude to heretics. Heresy differs from error in that the heretic refuses to be corrected, and so must be compelled to recant by force.

The book also shows the dangers inherent in some New Atheist rhetoric about religious believers. This runs in contrast to much New Atheist writing, which is genuinely progressive and expresses real sympathy with the marginalised and oppressed, and which advocates trying to see the world through their eyes. But no such sympathy is granted religious believers. They are described as children, who may not sit at the same table as adults. Or else, following the logic of religion as a virus, proposed by Dawkins, they are described as diseased, who do not realise that they have been infected and even love their condition.

Bringing children up religious is condemned as child abuse. A.C. Grayling is shown to have a utilitarian attitude in his own advocacy of secularisation. He first states that he supports it for creating multiculturalism, but then contradicts himself by stating that he looks forward to it undermining religion. This was the same attitude the Soviets initially adopted towards religion. When it didn’t disappear as they expected, they resorted to force. Peter Boghossian wants atheist ‘street epistemologists’ – the atheist version of religious street preachers – to attack believers’ religious beliefs in public. They are to take every opportunity, including following them into church, in order to initiate ‘Socratic’ discussions that will lead them to questioning their faith.

Johnstone states that this is an implicit denial of theists’ right to conduct their private business in public without atheist interference. It’s in line with the New Atheist demands that religion be driven from the public sphere, into the churches, or better yet, the home. The metaphor of disease and infection suggests that what is needed is for religious believers to be rounded up against their will and forcibly cured. It’s the same metaphor the Nazis used in their persecution of their victims.

He quotes the atheist philosopher Julian Baggini, who is dismayed when he hears atheists describing religion as a mental disease from which believers should be forcibly treated. As for the statement that religious upbringing equals child abuse, the seriousness of this charge raises the question of how seriously the New Atheists actually see it. If Dawkins and co. really believe that it is, then their lack of demand for state intervention to protect children from indoctrination, as they see it, from the parents shows that they don’t treat child abuse seriously.

The New Atheist rhetoric actually breaks with their concrete recommendations for what should be done to disavow believers of their religious views, which are actually quite mild. This is what Johnstone calls the ‘cavalierism of the unfinished thought’. They may not recommend coercion and persecution, but their rhetoric implies it. Johnstone states that he has discussed only one of several competing strands in New Atheist thinking and that there are others available. He concludes with the consideration that there isn’t a single atheism but a multiplicity of atheisms, all with differing responses to religious belief. Some of them will be comparably mild, but most will involve some kind of frustration at religion’s persistence. He recommends that atheists should identify which type of atheist they are, in order to avoid the violent intolerance inherent in New Atheist rhetoric. This agrees with his statement at the beginning of the book, where he hopes it will lead to an atheist response to religion which is properly informed by history and which genuinely respects religious believers.

The book is likely to be widely attacked by the New Atheists and their followers. Some of its conclusions Johnstone admits are controversial, such as the view that the Cathars never existed, or that the persecution of heretics was an integral part of the forging of the medieval state. But historians and sociologists of religion repeatedly show that in the persecutions and atrocities in which religion has been involved, religion is largely not the only, or in some cases even the most important reason. Johnstone’s views on witchcraft is supported by much contemporary popular and academic treatments. His statement that the figure of over nine million victims of the witch-hunt is grossly exaggerated is shared by Lois Martin in her The History of Witchcraft (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials 2002). The Harvard professor, Jeffrey Burton Russell in his Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1972) also shows how Christian attitudes towards witchcraft passed from the scepticism of the Canon Episcopi to belief as the responsibility for its persecution passed from the bishops to the Holy Office.

Early law codes treated maleficium – black or harmful magic – purely as a civil offence against persons or property. It became a religious crime with the development of the belief that witches attended sabbats where they parodied the Christian Eucharist and worshiped Satan. A paper describing the scrupulous legality and legal provisions for the accused’s defence in the Roman Inquisition can be found in the Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic In Europe IV: The Period of the Witch Trials, Bengt Ankerloo and Stuart Clarke eds., (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press 2002). Other writers on religion have noted the similarity between the late medieval and early modern witch-hunts and paranoid fears about Freemasons, Jews and Communists in later centuries, including the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges and McCarthyism. They thus see it as one manifestation of the wider ‘myth of the organised conspiracy’. See Richard Cavendish, ‘Christianity’, in Richard Cavendish, ed., Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopedia (London: Orbis 1980) 156-69 (168-9).

The Soviet persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church is described by Rev. Timothy Ware in his The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin 1963). Ludmilla Alexeyeva also describes the Soviet persecution of the Orthodox Church, along with other religions and national and political groups and movements in her Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights (Middletown, Connecticutt: Wesleyan University Press 1985). R.N. Carew Hunt’s The Theory and Practice of Communism (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1950) shows how leading Communists like Lenin believed atheism was an integral part of Communism and the Soviet state with a series of quotations from them. An example of Lenin’s demand for an aggressive atheism is his speech, ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’ in Lenin: Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1968). 653-60.

It is also entirely reasonable to talk about religious elements and attitudes within certain forms of atheism and secular ideologies. Peter Rogerson in many of his well-reasoned articles in Magonia pointed out how similar some of the sceptics’ attacks on superstition and the supernatural were to narratives of religious conversion. His attitude is shared with some academic sociologists, historians and political theorists. Peter Yinger’s section on ‘Secular Alternatives to Religion’ in The Religious Quest: A Reader, edited by Whitfield Foy (London: Open University Press 1978) 537-554, has articles on the ‘Religious Aspects of Postivism’, p. 544, ‘Faith in Science’, 546, ‘Religious Aspects of Marxism’, p. 547, ‘Totalitarian Messianism’ 549, and ‘Psychoanalysis as a Modern Faith’, 551. For some scholars, the similarities of some secular ideologies to religion is so strong, that they have termed them quasi-religions.

While some atheists resent atheism being described as religion, this term is meant to avoid such objections. It is not intended to describe them literally as religions, but only as ideologies that have some of the qualities of religion. See John E. Smith’s Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Macmillan 1994). New Atheism also mimics religion in that several of the New Atheists have written statements of the atheist position and edited anthologies of atheist writings. These are A.C. Grayling’s The Good Book and Christopher Hitchens’ The Portable Atheist. The title of Grayling’s book is clearly a reference to the Bible. As I recall, it caused some controversy amongst atheists when it was published, as many of them complained that atheism was too individual and sceptical to have a definitive, foundational text. In their view, Grayling’s book showed the type of mindset they wanted to escape when they left religion.

The fears of the terrible potential consequences of New Atheist rhetoric despite the avowed intentions of its authors is well founded and timely. There have been sharp complaints about some of the vitriolic rhetoric used to attack particular politicians in debates about Brexit which has resulted in assault and harassment. At the same it was reported that anti-Muslim hate crimes spiked after the publication of Boris Johnson’s column in which he described women wearing the burqa as looking like letterboxes. Neither religion, nor secularism and atheism should be immune from criticism. But Johnstone is right in that it should be correctly historically informed and careful in the language used. Otherwise the consequences could be terrible, regardless of the authors’ own humane feelings and sympathies.

Watson Intriguing Again After Splitters’ Departure, Stoking Anti-Semitism Witch-Hunt

After the departure of the nine Labour splitters, Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour party, is up to his old tricks again trying to undermine Corbyn. Watson to my mind looks like the American comedian Greg Proops, but without any of Proops’ wit, personality or charisma. He’s a Blairite, who is now trying to use the splitters’ departure to try to get his old chums back onto the front bench, develop a separate back bench power base, and then purge Corbyn’s supporters on the pretext that they’re anti-Semites.

Watson was on the Andrew Marr show to peddle his malign views on Sunday. He claimed that he had received 50 complaints of anti-Semitic abuse from MPs, and that he had passed them on to Corbyn. Now today I read in the Metro that he was demanding to be allowed to deal with allegations of anti-Semitism as well as the party secretary, Jenny Formby, because Formby allegedly wasn’t dealing with them quickly enough.

Yesterdays I, for Monday, 25th February 2019, quoted Watson as saying

‘I think he [Corbyn] needs to take a personal lead on examining those cases and, if necessary, recommend to our [ruling body]NEC what has to be done.

‘The test for him as a leader is to eradicate anti-Semitism. It is not Labour party members, who will be the judge of that, it is the British Jewish community.’

He also demanded a reshuffle of the front bench to represent a greater range of views, saying

‘If there isn’t one, I think I’d need to give a platform for my colleagues who want their ideas to be listened to by the current Shadow Cabinet’.

The I’s report about his intention to set up a back-bench group of MPs, ‘Splintering: Deputy leader to set up backbench group’, runs as follows

A new grouping of Labour MPs who are disillusioned with the party’s direction under Jeremy Corbyn is being set up by his deputy Tom Watson.

Its launch, which is expected within a fortnight, is aimed at preventing the trickle of defections of MPs to The Independent Group from becoming a flood.

But the faction will also inevitably be seen as a rival power based to Mr Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. I understands that organisers hope to attract more than 100 backbenchers into the group, which will appoint spokespeople and work on policy initiatives.

Meetings will be held within days to gauge the level of support for the group.

‘We need to assert ourselves more than we have done in the last two years,’ said one MP.

Mr Watson said he wanted to ‘give a platform’ to Labour MPs who felt excluded by the leadership.

‘My central point is that the social democratic voice has to be heard, because that is the only way you keep the Labour party unified and prohibit other colleagues from potentially leaving the PLP_ [Parliamentary Labour Party]. The situation is serious,’ he told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show.

Of course, Watson denies he is rebelling. The previous article in the I quoted him as saying that he was ‘standing up for pluralism in the party’.

This is just lies and doubletalk. Watson and the 100 MPs he wants to recruit are obviously Blairites, indignant at being forced out of power. They’ve been intriguing against the Labour leader ever since he came to power. They’ve threatened to leave several times before, just as they’ve tried to oust him as leader. But Corbyn is genuinely popular with the Labour grassroots activists, and his policies are immensely popular with the public. Which puts Watson and his fellow plotters in an awkward position: no-one wants their shoddy, mouldy neoliberal economics any longer. People are sick and tired of Labour trying to copy to the Tories as Blair and his coterie did. And the Blairites themselves were a small minority within the party. They dominated it because they seized control of party bureaucracy, just as Stalin and his supporters were able to seize control of the Communist apparat in the former Soviet Union. These backbench MPs may claim to be defending a plurality of views, but they only views they’re interested in defending and promoting are their own. Not Corbyn’s, and not anyone else’s in the party.

As for claiming to be Social Democrats, this is a sick joke. The Social Democratic tendency in the Labour party was the creation of Anthony Crosland. Crosland didn’t want further nationalisation, because he felt it was unnecessary. Its benefits, he felt, could be obtained instead through progressive taxation, strong trade unions and social mobility. Well, thanks to Thatcherism, social mobility stopped under Blair. In fact, I think under the Tories it’s even been reversed, so that for the first time since the late 19th century Marx’s statement that the middle class are being forced down into the working class is true, at least as far as middle class poverty goes. Similarly, Blair, as a Thatcherite, hated the trade unions and passed legislation aimed at destroying their power. With their acquiescence, it should be said. As for progressive taxation, they’re against that as well. Aaron Bastani quoted an interview in last week’s New Scientist with Chris Leslie in his article on the corrupt, compromised policies of the Independent Group. Leslie had said that he was not in favour of a 50 per cent tax rate. This was the tax rate set by Gordon Brown. And I don’t doubt Leslie was alone. My guess is that a number of the Blairites, who still remain in the Labour party, have the same noxious views.

Watson and the other Blarites aren’t Social Democrats: they’re Red Tories, Thatcherites. Any other description of them is a lie.

As for the anti-Semitism allegations, my guess is that it’s just more smears of people supporting Corbyn and standing up for the Palestinians. And when Watson says that Labour will be judged by the Jewish community, he’s not talking about the Jewish community as a whole. He’s talking about the Tory, Zionist Jewish establishment. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is monstrously right-wing and which is an explicitly Zionist organisation. An organisation which is morally corrupt and deeply compromised. How else can you describe an organisation which issued nauseating, spurious justifications for the IDF shooting unarmed Gazans last year? Which excludes Orthodox and secular Jews? And which howled with rage when Corbyn spent a Pesach (Passover) seder with the socialists of Jewdas, and claimed this was an insult to the Jewish community?

And the same is to be said about the Chief Rabbinate. The former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, caused shock and outrage when he called Reform Jews ‘enemies of the faith’, like a medieval inquisitor about to launch an auto-da-fe against heretics and Jews. He also considered homosexuality to be a terrible sin and warned his congregation not to join a gay rights march, until he later changed his mind, that is. And he led a contingent of Jewish British thugs to Israel to join the March of the Flags. That’s the day when Israeli ultra-nationalists march through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem vandalising their homes and businesses and threatening and intimidating them. I see no difference between it, and Tommy Robinson and his odious crew marching into British Muslim communities, or Mosley and the British Union of Fascists goose-stepping into the Jewish community in the East End in the 1930s. And when the Jewish community held their rallies last summer against Corbyn, organised by the Board and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, those attending including members and supporters of the Fascist organisations Kach, the Jewish Defence League, and the English Defence League Jewish Division.

Similarly, Watson’s declaration that he wants to assist in dealing with cases of anti-Semitism cases means that he’s unhappy with Formby’s handling of it for other reasons. He wants more Cobynites thrown out through the same spurious reasons that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism and that describing Israeli plotting to determine who should be in the cabinet as a ‘conspiracy’ is the same as reviving the smears on Jews as a whole of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Oh yes, and that showing a photoshopped image of a Jobcentre with the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ on it is another terrible anti-Semitic smear, rather than a justifiable description of the murderous policies of the DWP.

And his demand to decide these cases personally is the precise same tactic Stalin used when he gained power. Before Stalin became leader of the Soviet Communist party, the post of General Secretary was a relatively unimportant position. His comrades thought he was thick, and so gave him the job thinking that he would satisfied purging it of all the drunks and seducers. But as well as getting rid of them, he was also using it to purge his enemies’ supporters and fill it with his own. He’s supposed to have said of the power of elections, ‘It’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes’.

Watson is a typical Blairite. He follows Blair and the others as a destructive neoliberal, who wants absolute obedience to a highly centralised, dictatorial party elite. It is not Corbyn and his supporters who should be thrown out, but him and his.

Torquemada: 2000 AD’s ‘Ultimate Fascist’ and a Prediction of the Rise of the Brextremists, Kippers and Trump

As you’ve probably gather from reading my previous posts about art robot Kevin O’Neill, I was and am a big fan of the ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ strip that ran in 2000 AD from 1980 through the 1990s. The villain of the piece was Torquemada, the former chief of the Tube police on an Earth thousands of years in the future. Outraged by the interbreeding between humans and their alien subjects, Torquemada overthrew the last, debauched emperor, founding an order of viciously genocidal knights, the Terminators. The construction of the linked White and Black Hole bypasses, giving Earth instant access to the Galaxy, also created terrible temporal catastrophes, resulting in creatures from even further into the future appearing in the present. These included the terrible gooney birds, giant predatory Concorde aircraft, which fed on the trains and anything else that travelled over Earth’s devastated surface. Torquemada and his Terminators blamed these disasters on aliens, killed human scientists and engineers, leading humanity into a new Dark Age. The Human race retreated underground, where the Terminators told them they would be safe from the terrible aliens threatening them. Terra was renamed ‘Termight’ – ‘Mighty Terra’, though Mills also gave it the name because the underground society resembled a massive termites’ nest. And Torquemada set up a corrupt, Fascistic, quasi-feudal society, which also included Orwellian elements from the classic 1984.

Pitched against Torquemada was the hero, Nemesis, an alien warlock. Horned and hooved, with magical powers, he resembled the Devil, and at one point, in conversation with his mad, cruel uncle Baal, he explicitly states that his powers are satanic. Nemesis is also the head of Credo, a human resistance movement dedicated to overthrowing Torquemada and restoring freedom and interspecies tolerance to Earth. Also resisting humanity’s aggressive expansion and extermination of other intelligent races were the Cabal, an alliance of various alien worlds.

The strip was possibly one of the weirdest 2000 AD had run, and was too weird for editor Kevin Gosnell, who hated it. But it was massively popular, at one point even rivalling the mighty Judge Dredd. Torquemada became British comics’ most popular villain, winning that category in the Eagle Award four years in a row. He was so popular that in the end I heard that they stopped submitting or accepting the character, in order to let others have a chance.

Torquemada speaks on the radio, in the strip that launched the character and Nemesis, ‘Going Underground’.

Looking back, I have mixed feelings about the strip. I still like it, but I’m not entirely comfortable with a hero, who has explicitly satanic characteristics, nor the villains, who are very much in the style of medieval Christian crusaders. Mills and O’Neill had had the misfortune to suffer brutal Roman Catholic education, and Mills states that where he grew up, everyone involved in the Roman Catholic establishment was corrupt. Everyone. They poured everything they hated about the bigotry and cruelty they had seen and experienced into the strip.

From a historians’ perspective, it’s not actually fair on the Roman Catholic church. Yes, medieval Christianity persecuted Jews, heretics and witches, and warred against Islam. But the great age of witch-hunting was in the 17th century, and cut across faith boundaries. Prof. Ronald Hutton, a History lecturer at Bristol Uni, who has studied the history of witchcraft and its modern revival – see his book Triumph of the Moon – has pointed out that the German Protestant states killed more witches than the Roman Catholics. And those accused of witchcraft in Italy had far better legal protection in the 16th century than those in Henry VIII’s England. You had a right to a lawyer and proper legal representation. If you couldn’t afford one, the court would appoint one for you. Torture was either outlawed, or very strictly regulated. There was a period of 50 years when the Holy Office was actually shut, because there were so few heretics and witches to hunt down.

As for the equation between medieval Roman Catholicism and Fascism, a graduate student, who taught medieval studies got annoyed at this glib stereotype. it kept being repeated by their students, and was historically wrong. This student came from a Protestant background, but was more or less a secular atheist, although one who appreciated the best of medieval Christian literature.

Underneath the personal experiences of Mills and O’Neill, the strip’s depiction of a future feudal society was also influenced by Protestant anti-Catholic polemic, and the theories of the 19th century French liberal, anti-Christian writer, Charles Michelet. It was Michelet, who first proposed that the witch-hunts were an attempt by patriarchal Christianity to wipe out an indigenous, matriarchal folk paganism. It’s a view that has strongly influenced feminist ecopaganism, although academic scholars like Hutton, and very many pagans have now rejected it as historically untrue.

The robes and masks worn by the Terminators recalled not only those worn by Spanish Catholic penitents during the Easter Day processions, but also the Klan, who are an Protestant organisation, which hates Roman Catholics as well Jews and Blacks.

There’s also the influence of John Wyndham’s classic SF novel, The Chrysalids. This is set in Labrador centuries in the future, after a nuclear war has devastated much of the world, except for a few isolated spots of civilisation. Society has regressed to that of 17th century Puritanism. The survivors are waging a war to restore and maintain the original form of their crops, animals and themselves. Mutants, including humans, are examined and destroyed at birth. As with the Terminators, their clothing is embroidered with religious symbols. In this case a cross. Just as Torquemada denounces aliens as ‘deviants’, so do the leaders of this puritanical regime describe human mutants. And like the pro-alien humans in Nemesis, a woman bearing a mutant child is suspected and punished for her perceived sexual deviancy.

In fact, the underlying anti-religious, anti-Christian elements in the strip didn’t bother me at the time. Mike and myself went to an Anglican church school here in Bristol, though the teaching staff also included people from other Christian denominations such as Methodism and Roman Catholicism. They had a real horror of sectarian bigotry and violence, sharpened by the war in Northern Ireland, and were keenly aware that Christians had done terrible things in the name of religion. I can remember hearing a poem on this subject, The Devil Carried a Crucifix, regularly being recited at school assembly, and the headmaster and school chaplain preaching explicitly against bigotry. At the same time, racial prejudice was also condemned. I can remember one poem, which denounced the colour bar in one of its lines, repeatedly turning up in the end of year services held at the church to which the school was attached.

I also have Roman Catholic relatives and neighbours, who were great people. They were committed to their face, but also bitterly opposed to sectarian bigotry and violence. And the Roman Catholic clergy serving my bit of Bristol were decent men and women, though some of those in other areas were much more sectarian. I’ve Protestant friends, who went on to study RE at a Roman Catholic college. Their experience was not Mills’ and O’Neill’s, though I also had relatives, who were estranged from the Church because they had suffered the same kind of strict, and violently repressive Roman Catholic education that they had.

But Torquemada and the Terminators were far from being a veiled comment on atrocities committed by medieval Roman Catholicism. Torquemada modelled himself on Tomas de Torquemada, the leader of the Spanish Inquisition, whose bloody work he so much admired. But he also explicitly styled himself as the supreme Fascist. By fostering humanity’s hatred of aliens, he hoped to unite the human race so that they didn’t fight each other over differences in colour. But the character was also supposed to be the reincarnation of every persecuting bigot in European and American history. In one story, Torquemada becomes seriously ill, breaking out in vast, festering boils, because Nemesis’ lost son, Thoth, has used the tunnels dug by the Tube engineers to channel away the destructive energies of the White and Black Hole bypasses, to travel backwards in time to kill Torquemada’s previous incarnations. These include Adolf Hitler, natch, one of the notoriously murderous American cavalry officers, responsible for the butchery of innocent indigenous Americans in the Indian Wars, and finally Torquemada himself. Torquemada therefore travelled back in time to confront his former incarnation, and save himself from Thoth.

This was followed by another story, in which Torquemada himself travelled forward to the 20th century. Infected with time energy, Torquemada caused temporal disruptions and catastrophes in the London of the present. He found himself a job as a rack-renting landlord, before founding a Fascist political party. Using Brits’ fears that these disasters were caused by aliens, he became a successful politician and was elected to Number 10.

And one of Torque’s previous incarnations, recovered by Brother Mikron, his pet superscientist, using advanced technological hypnotic regression, was very familiar to British readers with an awareness of the history of Fascism in their country.

Torquemada as Hitler, and very Mosley-esque British Far Right politician. From Prog 524, 30th May 1987.

In the above page, Brother Mikron recovers Torquemada’s past incarnation as Hitler, but only after encountering a later incarnation, in which Torquemada was Sir Edwin Munday, the British prime minister, and leader of the New Empire Party. Munday/Torquemada goes off an a rant on public television, shouting

‘I’ll solve the youth problem! We’ll make our children respectable again! – with compulsory short back and sides! The return of National Service! Order and discipline’.

His name clearly recalls that of the far right, anti-immigration Monday Club in the Tory party, which was at the centre of continuing scandals during the 70s and 80s over the racism of some of its members, the most notorious of whom was Thatcher’s cabinet minister, Norman Tebbit. As a member of the aristocracy, Munday also draws on Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists and later Fascist movements.

Mosley unfurling his Fascist banner in the ’30s.

The rhetoric about youth is also very much that of the Tories around Maggie Thatcher, who really didn’t like long-haired liberals, hippies, punks and the other youth movements, who had sprung up at the time. They were calling for the return of National Service to stop the rise in youth crime and delinquency.

And this is now very much the attitude of the Kippers and Brextremists over here, who really do hanker after the old days of the British Empire, with all its pomp and authoritarianism. The last thing that incarnation of Torquemada says is

‘We’ll make our country great again!’

This is also based on the rhetoric of the Tories at the time, in which Thatcher was credited with turning around Britain’s decline and restoring her to her glory. In the general election that year, the Tory party election broadcasts showed old footage of Spitfires and Hurricanes racing around the sky shooting down Nazi planes, while an overexcited actor exclaimed ‘It’s great – to be great again!’

No, she didn’t make us great. She wrecked our economy and welfare state, and sold everything off to foreign firms, all the while ranting hypocritically about how she represented true British patriotism.

But it also recalls Trump’s rhetoric last year, during his election campaign. When he announced ‘We’ll make America great again!’ And he’s gone on to use the same neoliberalism as Reagan, Thatcher, and successive Democrat and New Labour leaders, backed with racist rhetoric and legislation supported by White supremacists.

Torquemada was one of 2000 AD’s greatest comments on sectarian bigotry and racism, with Torquemada as its very explicit symbol. Even after three decades, it’s central message about the nature of Fascism, imperialism and colonialism, and the western hankering for its return, remains acutely relevant.

History and the Witch Hunts

For most people, the witch hunts provide one of the most powerful testimonies of the evils of institutional religion and specifically the Christian Church. According to the popular image of the witch hunts, this was the time when a powerful Christian church kept humanity in ignorance and superstition, exercising a tyranny over intellectual life that saw hundreds of thousands, if not millions of innocent women sent to the stake. It was a campaign of intolerance against indigenous, pre-Christian religions, which were unjustly misrepresented and viciously attacked by the church’s bureaucracy. Through the Inquisition and its manuals, like the notorious Malleus Maleficarum, the Church blocked scientific investigation and progress, keeping humanity in mental world of superstition and magic. The Roman Catholic Church was responsible for persecuting innocent people as witches in the Middle Ages. After the Reformation, they were succeeded in bigotry and superstition by the Puritans, whose scientific ignorance and religious intolerance resulted in the brutal reign of Matthew Hopkins, the infamous ‘witchfinder general’ in Cromwellian England, and the horror of the Salem witch hunt in New England.

Now the witch hunts certainly were a brutal period in European and American history. The vast majority of Christians today rightly regard the use of violence, torture and execution to enforce religious conformity abhorrent, and the savage persecution of the vast majority of the accused deserves its condemnation. Unfortunately, the Satanism scare of a few years ago and repeated persecution of suspected witches in parts of Africa demonstrates that the mythology of the malevolent witch is still very much alive today, and needs to be combatted by people of humanity and decency, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof. Nevertheless, amongst the true horrors of the witch hunts there are serious distortions and exaggerations, perpetuated by 19th century radical, secularist and Neo-pagan journalists and historians with an anticlerical and antichristian agenda. The result is a view of the witch hunts and the Middle Ages that often sharply varies from the reality. It’s view that needs to be tackled and rebutted.

Middle Ages Not Totally Period of Superstition

Firstly, historians today are increasingly critical of the idea of the Middle Ages as a period of superstition and credulity. The secular French historian, Jean Claude Bologne, has pointed out that most of the spell books date from the 16th – 19th centuries. 1 For Bologne, the goal of the medieval intellectuals was, above all, to find the ‘tricks’ concealed behind miracles, and represent as ‘natural’, what appears to violate the laws of nature. No one is more sceptical of a miracle than a theologian. 2 The Scottish historian of magic, P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, notes that the Middle Ages was a period of intense intellectual challenge and change. The Middle Ages, ‘popularly regarded as something of a stagnant entity, was in fact a millennium of the most intense waves of challenge beating with frequent violence upon the supposedly settled shores of religious, intellectual, and political orthodoxy.’ 3 It was a period when universities and monastic schools were founded, the created universe was examined a constant sense of curiosity and awe, and Arabic, Hebrew and Greek learning entered Europe through Latin translations ‘to leaven the intellects of Europe and produce fresh ideas, fresh theories, and fresh interpretations of everything, theological or temporal: an ebullience which makes the notion of a ‘superstitious’ Middle Ages misleading at best and nonsensical at worse.’ 4 Indeed, Maxwell-Stuart points out that the medieval worldview could be described as ‘sceptical’, though not in the modern sense. The universe was understood and examined in relation to God, with history as the continuing narrative of humanity’s relationship with the Lord. This examination of the nature of the cosmos involved doubt, both because of the liability of the individual to error, and because the nature of the universe was such that it could produce misunderstanding, illusions and deceit. The medieval project to understand the operation and meaning of the cosmos in relation to God, and thus allow humanity to transcend history and approach God ‘is perfectly rational.’ 5

The idea that the Middle Ages was a period of superstition and ignorance, represented by the Roman Catholic Church, in contrast to the modern, forward-looking and ‘rational’ age, was the product of the 18th century French radical philosophes. It has persisted because it assumes that the historical process is one of progress from primitivism to sophistication, with the present age one of comfortable sophistication. 6 It was buttressed by 19th century romantic historical novels and early 20th century anthropology, which were strongly influenced by Darwinism and imperial and racial assumptions of natural hierarchy. These also created the image of a quaint, superstitious peasantry, liable to be awed by the technological inventions that the more sophisticated upper classes took in their stride.7 Indeed, the notion that humanity has moved from magic through religion to science has for many scholars been thoroughly discredited because the three have at times been indistinguishable and all of them have been found in varying degrees of sophistication in societies ranging from the primitive to the modern. 8

Idea of Medieval Witch Hunts the Product of 19th Century Anticlericalism

Much of the idea that the witch hunts were the product of Roman Catholic superstition was produced by 19th century liberal historians like Jules Garinet in France and Henry Scott Lea in America. Their approach was influenced and informed by an optimistic belief in scientific progress and human rationality. ‘Emotionally committed to liberalism and viewing the Church as an obstacle in the road of progress, they reject the possibility of there being any real currents of witch belief and practice and insist that not the witches, but the inquisitors invented witchcraft.’ 9 The most influential scholar of this view was Lea, who was an historian of the Inquisition. He was followed by Andrew Dickson White, the president of Cornell University partly responsible for the myth of the war of science with religion. White considered that ‘witches were unfortunate wretches blamed by superstitious Catholicism for natural disasters like storms for which White knew the true, scientific, explanations.’ 10

The history of witchcraft and the witch hunts has also suffered from the false claims of 19th century radical journalists and social campaigners like Jules Michelet in France and the American feminist campaigner, Matilda Joslyn Gage. Michelet, in his 1862 book, La Sorciere, viewed the medieval witch cult as an egalitarian peasant religion of nature in which women were natural healers, enchantress and the guardians of the cult’s ancient secrets. These witches were heroic rebels against the brutality of an oppressive, feudal hierarchy and the misogynist Roman Catholic church. 11 This view was taken up and embellished by Gage in the 1890s. She saw the medieval witch cult as the remnant of ancient, matriarchal religion that venerated Mother Earth. 12 This cult was suppressed by the Roman Catholic church, which reinforced male domination by removing the cult’s female healers and priestesses. 13 It was Gage who invented the figure of the supposed nine million people executed for witchcraft. 14

Ancient Origins of Belief in Witches

In fact the Middle Ages experienced relatively few witch hunts. ‘Fear of it permeates folklore of all periods, but it was not until the late 15th century that it was perceived in Europe as a threat grave enough to require systematic prosecution.’ 15 Witches, and the belief in magic existed long before Christianity. A large amount of surviving Hittite literature is magical, and black magic was treated in Hittite law as a crime in the same category as assault and battery. 16 The Twelve Tables of Roman traditional law treated the recitation of a malum carmen – an evil spell – as a criminal offence. 17 Roman literature contains a number of witches and descriptions of witchcraft. Horace in his Epodes describes the horrific murder of a child by witches. While the incident is fictional, and may have been intended as part of a propaganda campaign against witches by the pagan Roman emperor Augustus, nevertheless there were witches working clandestinely in the Roman slums. 18

Medieval Scepticism of Witchcraft

While the early Christians certainly believed in the existence of demons, and believed they were active in the world, there was considerable scepticism about human witches. Saint Augustine stated that while demons were able to change their shapes, humans could not and God does not grant power to demons to change things from one form into another. When this occurred, it was merely an illusion. 19 The ritual masquerades held in honour of Diana on the 1st of January, in which some people believed that they had really been transformed into animals, was viewed as irrational by some clerical writers. Observing them, Caesarius of Heisterbach declared ‘What rational person could believe that he would find men of sound mind who would wish to change themselves into a stag or other wild beast?’ 20 The Pactus Alamannorum, the law code of the Alamanni tribe of southern Germany, of 613-623 punished wrongful accusations of witchcraft against innocents with a fine, and prohibited the seizing and harming of witches by individuals. The Frankish king Rothari, in an edict of 643, prohibited the burning of women for the crime of cannibalism as the crime was impossible. 21 The capitulary – the governmental order – issued by the Frankish emperor Charlemagne for Saxony of 775-790 strictly prohibited violence against innocents suspected of witchcraft: ‘If anyone, deceived by the Devil, believes after the manner of the pagans that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and if on this account he burns (the alleged witch) or gives her flesh to be eaten or eats it, he shall be punished by capital sentence.’ 22 Here the belief in witches is treated as a pagan superstition, the result of Satanic delusion. Nevertheless, belief in magic was strong and punishments could be harsh. King Alfred the Great in England punished witchcraft with the death penalty. However, the Carolingians in France and Visigoths in Spain, although passing harsh legislation against witchcraft, tended to treat it in much the same way as other harmful crimes against people and property. 23 The church penitentials of the seventh to ninth centuries mostly punished black magic, incantations and idolatry with penances for three years. 24

Medieval witchcraft appears to have emerged from a mixture of the belief in night-flying, malignant spirits – the striga and lamia of the Romans; that certain people were able to leave their homes at night to join the wild ride with the spirits of the dead across the world under the leadership of Diana, Herodias or Holda, a witch of Germanic folklore; and the activities of Christian heretical sects, such as the Cathars and Waldensians, that were accused of holding orgies presided over by a demon or the Devil himself. 25

Nevertheless, the early medieval legislation against witchcraft was sceptical of the existence of night-flying witches. The Canon Episcopi, published by Regino of Prum in 906 and the Corrector of Burchard of Worms, considered the belief that certain women left their homes at night to fly across the Earth following the Greek goddess Diana, to be deluded by the Devil and urged parish clergy to act against them and their delusion. 26 This scepticism continued into the 12th century, when John of Salisbury, who believed in the reality of magic, repeated the comments about the night ride of with Herodias and Diana as a delusion, and viewed the idea of shapeshifting as a similar demonic illusion. 27 There has been an attempt by some historians to claim that Thomas Aquinas was responsible for spreading the mythology of the existence of witches that supported the persecutions of the Inquisition. In fact, Aquinas views were entirely traditional. While he firmly believed in the existence of demons and magic, he believed that demons could only act with God’s permission. Magicians implicitly formed a pact with the demons they invoked, but he doubted that anyone had ever made a pact face to face with a demon, like Faust. He similarly saw the night flight as illusory, and while he believed that there were demons who had sex with people, he did not consider this to occur during the orgies supposedly held by witches. ‘The great scholastic can in no way be held responsible for the witch phenomenon except in the general sense that the Aristotelian system he used was conducive to support of the craze that was beginning to grow.’ 28 Some intellectuals remained sceptical In the 15th century, for example, the author of a treatise on witchcraft written in Cologne considered that some of the illusions ascribed to demons were really the entirely natural product of disturbed minds. Antonio Guaineri, the author of a medical treatise that briefly considered witchcraft, stated that the incubus who supposedly had sex with sleeping women was psychological in origin, caused by some kind of physiological disorder. 29 Medieval medicine considered that nightmares were sometimes due to the pressure of the stomach on the heart, particularly after a heavy meal. This blocked the healthy flow of the vital spirit that animated the body through the nerves, thus causing nightmares. 30 While this explanation has been thoroughly discredited by modern medicine, nevertheless it demonstrates that alongside the theological discussion of witchcraft there was a tradition of scientific research that also considered non-supernatural explanations. Nicholas of Cusa considered people who confessed to witchcraft to be merely mad. 31 Nicholas Oresme certainly believed demons were active in the world and followed by witches. However, this was rare, and confessions of witchcraft should be treated with scepticism because they were obtained through torture or the threat of torture. 32

Societal Factors in the Expansion of Belief in Witches

Despite this tradition of scepticism, the belief in witches expanded. The church acted to counter this perceived threat from heresy and witchcraft with the foundation of the Inquisition by Gregory IX after the end of the Albigensian Crusade in 1229. 33 Along with the theological and philosophical reasons for the growth of belief in witches in their powers were economic, political and sociological factors that created a sense of crisis in medieval civilisation and society, a sense of threat that sought a solution to the strains of contemporary civilisation in the attempt to identify and destroy an obvious source of the threat. In the case of medieval culture, this was witches. However, contemporary scholars have remarked that societies under stress and rapid change generally become intolerant, and seek out or invent clandestine conspiratorial groups that are perceived to be a threat to society. A. Rebecca Cardozo, in her comparison of the similarities between the medieval and McCarthyite witch hunts, has stated that

‘Social, political, economic and religious upheaval makes a society especially vulnerable to a craze. In an atmosphere of confusion and uncertainty, people become intolerant towards change; and it is primarily social, political and religious intolerance that provides the initial impetus for a craze.’ 34

Historians of medieval witchcraft like Jeffrey Burton Russell have recognised the role social change and dislocation played in creating the belief in witches and the witch hunts. From the 11th century onwards Europe experienced marked economic and societal change, marked by a growth in population, the rise of the towns, the development of trade and industry. These changes resulted in religious and spiritual change, such as the stress on apostolic poverty, heresy, and reforming movements within the monastic orders and Church hierarchy. ‘These changes caused a break in the sense of community, a break causing anonymity and alienation.’ 35 These changes were exacerbated by the plagues and famines, including the Black Death, which destroyed nearly a third of the European population, in the 14th century, and the wars and rebellions of the 15th. The change from the use of serf labour, bound to the aristocratic manor, and the movement of the population away from the villages to the towns changed the structure of the medieval family. The extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins was replaced by the nuclear family of parents, children and possibly grandparents. The result of this was the increased isolation of the elderly when the rest of the family moved away in search of work. ‘Abandoned, the old people were prey to anxieties and fears that might cause them to adopt witchcraft or at least drive them to eccentric behaviour that could cause them to be considered witches.’ 36 Sociologists studying the Satanism scare of the 1990s also noted the profound effect economic decline and family breakdown also had in generating rumours of the vile activities of suspected Satanic groups. The rumour-panic of Satanic crimes took place firstly in the American ‘rust belt’, such as western New York and northwestern Pennsylvania where industries that traditionally paid good wages were disappearing, leaving unemployment and anxiety. 37 Similarly, the stable family structure that provided emotional support, problem solving and financial help has similarly suffered disintegration due to changing economic circumstances and social roles. The result has been a rise in marriage breakdowns and parent-child conflicts, as well as teenage drug abuse, and single parent families in the small town and rural communities in which the Satanism scare first emerged. 38 Thus economic and social stresses, and strains and breakdown in the family, can produce the anxieties leading to witchcraft scares both in the Middle Ages and in today’s technological, industrial society.

Torture and Burning of Witches Partly Based on Secular Law

The view of the medieval Inquisition as the primary cause of the accusations of witchcraft has been extensively critiqued. Historians have challenged the idea that the Inquisition was more brutal in its methods than other contemporary courts, including secular tribunals. The adoption of torture and burning for the interrogation and punishment of heretics and witches is a problem for the view of history that considers societies progress from superstition and brutality to enlightenment and humanity. The early Church, for example, strongly opposed torture, and it was also opposed by the papacy, including popes such as Gregory the Great and Nicholas I. It was illegal under Canon Law until the 13th century. It was adopted by the Church following the practice of secular courts and the rediscovery of Roman law, which had provided for torture as part of judicial proceedings. 39 Thus, the rediscovery of part of the classical heritage, which also provided the basis for the modern constitutional state, was also responsible for the reintroduction of torture into European law.

Although the first fully attested burning of heretics was of those of Orleans in 1022, it was unusual and not provided for in most law codes. While it had a theological base in the purifying fire mentioned in the Bible, Greeks, Teutons and Romans had also used it as a punishment for certain offences. It may have been introduced as a replacement for the trial by ordeal, condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. 40 It was adopted by the Church after it was established as the punishment for heresy by secular European rulers. It entered canon law following the endorsement of the German emperor Frederick II’s adoption of it as the punishment for heresy by popes Honorius III, Gregory IX and the Council of Toulouse. 41

Brutality of 16th century Inquisition Exaggerated

While the operation and procedures of the medieval Inquisition have rightly been condemned, historians have also suggested that, following the reforms of the bull Licet ab initio of July 1542, the Inquisition included many aspects of modern criminal law. 42 In trials under Roman jurisdiction, depositions were made under oath to exclude loose accusations. Individuals testifying were required to provide the names of people whom they considered their enemies, in order to prevent charges caused by personal grudges. Although the names of the prosecuting witness were withheld from the defendant and his attorney, nevertheless records of the proceedings were supplied to the accused and his lawyers so that they could prepare a proper defence. Torture was allowed, but its use was restricted and strictly supervised. Physicians were called on to testify that the illness affecting the bewitched victim was the result of natural causes, rather than magic. The Inquisitors did not look for the Devil’s mark supposedly left on the bodies of the witches by Satan, and the testimony of witnesses with poor reputations could not lead to the defendant’s torture. Witches also were not sent to the stake for a first offence if they showed signs of genuine repentance. 43 Furthermore, the accused were allowed a defence attorney, extrajudicial confessions were not valid, and the system allowed appeals to a higher court. There was considerable leniency to first offenders, and long before the civil authorities used imprisonment as a punishment rather than just for custody of the accused during the trial this was the procedure taken by the Inquisition. In some respects Inquisitorial law was remarkably modern. ‘A sentence to life imprisonment by the Holy Office meant, as it does today, parole after a few years, subject to good behaviour; and hose arrest, joined to work-release programmes, tentatively being considered at present by some our more progressive, communities, was a common form of penal service practised by the Inquisition in its day.’ 44

Concern for Reputation of Accused

Inquisitiors were well aware of their duty to protect people’s reputation from harm caused by wrongful accusations. Eliseo Masini, in his manual Sacro Arsenale, stated that ‘great prudence must be exercised in the jailing of suspects because the mere fact of incarceration for teh crime of heresy brings notable infamy to the person. Thus it will be necessary to study carefully  the nature of the evidence, the quality of the witnesses and the condition of the accused.’ 45

Inquisitors’ Relative Scepticism towards Witchcraft

The Inquisitors were also relatively sceptical in their attitude towards witchcraft, a fact that saved Italy from the extremely savage witch hunts elsewhere in Europe. Masin stated that

 ‘In prosecuting suspected witches the inquisitor must not reach the point of incarceration, inquisition or torture until the corpus delicti is judicially established. The presence of sickness in a man or the presence of a corpse in themselves do not constitute adequate evidence, since infirmity and death do not need to be connected to acts of witchcraft but can rsult from a large number of natural causes. The first step, therefore, is to question the physician who attended the patient.’ 46

Indeed, the Holy Office itself acted to suppress a witchcraft panic in Florence that had resulted in gross miscarriages of justice by the secular authorities. The Holy Office declared that ‘these matters are extremely fallacious, and, as daily experience demonstrates, much more real in the imagination of men than in the reality of events; too often every illness whose cause is not immediately discernible, or whose remedy is not readily available is attributed to malefice.’ 47

The testimony of witches was considered unreliable as the basis for the prosecution of others. Judges were specifically instructed not to believe the testimony of witch that named other people they had supposedly met at the Sabbat, as witches did not physically travel to them but only in their imaginations and illusions inspired by the Devil. 48 After the initial interrogation, if the accused had not cleared himself or been pronounced guilty, they were given a record of the entire trial to allow them to prepare their defence. They were allowed to call friend witnesses, who were to be given travel expenses by the court if they came from distant parts and the accused was too poor to afford their expenses. 49. The accused was to be provided with a lawyer if he stated that he needed legal help. He was asked to supply the names of three lawyers, one of which would be selected to represent him by the court. 50 If the defendant was too poor to afford a lawyer, one was to be provided for them. 51 This situation compares extremely favourably with secular courts. Defence lawyers were excluded from the secular legal codes promulgated by the emperor Charles V in 1532 and in France by the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets of 1539. In England the accused in criminal trials, except those involving treason, were denied legal defence until the Prisoners Counsel Bill of 1836. 52

Strict Controls on Use of Torture 

The use of torture was rigidly controlled. It could only be applied after the defendant had presented their case and the evidence was compelling. The decision to apply it was not the inquisitor’s alone. He had to seek the opinion of the consultori, a permanent advisory committee of six lawyers and theologians that sat on every inquisitorial court. In particularly difficult cases, the evidence was supplied to Rome, with the testimony in the words of the witnesses and the accused themselves in the vernacular and not in specially prepared Latin translations used by the court. If these sanctions were not observed, the evidence obtained under torture would be thrown out of court. 53 Torture was only to be used on people who could stand it. When a physician testified that the prisoner could not endure it, it was not used. 54 The usual method of torture was to tie the accused’s hands behind their back, draw them up to the ceiling and then drop them. Mercifully, sessions of this horrific abuse tend to last only half an hour. The maximum permitted length of time was an hour. 55 A confession obtained by this method was only considered valid if it was ratified outside the torture chamber 24 hours later. 56 Sentences were closely scrutinised by the Vatican, and commuted and cases reopened where irregularities were detected. 57

Relatively Humane Punishment of Offenders

As today, when the complaint is often that ‘life imprisonment’ really means only a few years, the formal language used for sentences may exaggerate their severity. Carcere perpetuo – perpetual prison – actually meant only three years, provided the accused repented. Carcere perpetuo irrimissible actually meant an eight-year sentence. 58 Immuratio, which meant true life imprisonment, actually meant confinement in a room with four walls, rather than being walled up alive. 59 Sentences included imprisonment in a monastery, house arrest, or confinement to a particular area that could range from a village to a city or contado. Elderly wage-earners with modest incomes, large families and daughters of marriageable age and witches whose husbands would take them back were generally assigned back to their homes and shop. 60

Regarding conditions in the prisons of the Holy Office in the Palazzo Pucci, cells were spacious and well-lit, with a bed, table, sheets and towels. There was a barber, bathing facilities, laundry service and mending. Prisoners were allowed a change of clothing twice a week. They were required to appear before the Holy Office to state their material needs and the cardinals were expected to inspect the prisons. On the other hand, prisoners could only read and write about their immediate cases, and could not talk privately with their gaolers or use them to communicate with the outside world. 61 Clergy certainly were not exempt from prosecution, and the Church dealt with them more severely than lay people. 62 While sentences could include the horros of the galleys, there was the possibility of commutation of the sentence even there. 63 Most sentences, however, consisted of public humiliations, such as public abjurations read on the cathedral steps on Sundays and feast days; penances, fines paid to charities, and a cycle of prayers and devotions to be said for months or years. 64

Capital punishment was rare, and reserved for the unrepentant, those with a previous sentence for heresy and those who attempted to overturn central Christian doctrines such as the Virgin Brith and the full divinity of Christ. 65 Only 97 people were executed by the Holy Office in Rome for the period 1542 to 1761. 66 While that’s clearly 97 too many, it ‘s far from the millions suggested by some individuals. John Tedeschi, an historian of the 16th century Inquisition, has concluded that

‘It is impossible to condone coercion, the stake, and the other horrors perpetrated in the name of religion during the Reformation era. They were employed both by the Inquisition and by almost all other judicial bodies in Europe. In the sixteenth century they were an unquestioned part of legal proceedings. But I believe that future research will show that they were used less frequently, wtih greater moderation, and with a higher regard for human rights and life in the tribunals of the Holy Office than elsewhere. Scepticism and incredulity in regard to witchcraft invaded Roman legal circles early in teh seventeenth century, at a time when the lands north of the Pyrenees and the Alps remained in the grip of a witch-hunting mania. It was a modest step towards sanity, and a glimmer of hope at the end of a dark tunnel.’ 67

Lack of Officially Motivated Witch Hunts in England

There were also very few witch trials in England during the Middle Ages and sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Most accusations came from quarrels between members of the minor gentry or people in the lower ranks of society. There was no pressure from the central authorities in church or state to prosecute witches. Although James I in 1604 punished magic and witchcraft with death, in practice the trials focussed on the alleged harm done through magic rather than the use of magic itself. Witches were also believed to operate singly or in small groups, so that there was little pressure on witches to incriminate others. 68 Moreover, torture was not used in England, though witches could be kept awake to force a confession. They were also commonly thrown into rivers to see if they would float, as it was believed that water would reject a witch, as a mark of their guilt. As a result of this relative leniency in England, the number of people executed for witchcraft estimated by historians has fallen from ‘under 1000’ to ‘under 500’. Most witches were acquitted. Of the 513 people charged in the Home Assize Circuit between 1559 and 1736 – the date when the Witchcraft Acts were repealed – 200 were convicted and 109 hanged. Again, it’s still far too many, but it’s not quite the vast numbers suggested by some ideas about the prevalence of superstition and fear in England during this period. 69 In many cases, the accused were able to clear themselves through simple compurgation – formally swearing to their innocence with a group of friends and relatives – at the episcopal court. Of the eight women charged with witchcraft in Somerset in England before Bishop Still in 1594, three were dismissed after successfully swearing their innocence, even though one of these was unable to provide the full number of compurgators. One failed to provide any compurgators at all, but was dismissed one and a half years later as her neighbours testified she was not suspected. The one person who was suspect of having killed someone by magic was handed over to be tried by the local justice of the peace. ‘Generally speaking, all seem to have been sympathetically treated.’70

Puritans Not Opposed to Science and Not Wholly Responsible for Witch Hunts

Similarly, the image of the Puritans as enemies of science also has a highly questionable basis in history. Historians have pointed out that Puritanism and the new, emerging experimental science shared a common anti-authoritarianism, optimism about human possibilities, rational empiricism  and the emphasis on experience. They were considered to be intrinsically compatible, to the extent that many anti-Puritan contemporaries strongly identified them with the New Philosophy. 71 The image of the Puritans as hostile to the new learning was due to anti-Puritan polemicists, such as the Royal Society’s apologist, Thomas Sprat. 72 Rather being opposed to science and learning, the Puritans generally staunchly supported it. They were the main supporters of the new science before the Restoration of the English monarchy, and strongly influenced the next generation. 73 The prosecution of witches in England during the 16th and 17th century was not a particular product of Puritanism. While it was said that Hopkins was the son of a Puritan minister, and he claimed to have a commission from the government to seek out witches, he is not known to have had any positive encouragement from the central government or any particular sectarian religious views. 74 Hopkins appears instead to have merely taken advantage of the breakdown in central government during the Civil War/ War of the Three Kingdoms. His colleague John Stearne was a Puritan, but the only evidence of Puritan sympathies was a passing remark, possibly by Hopkins, that when the Devil married witches he used the Anglican ceremony in the Book of Common Prayer. 75 Hopkins himself was not popular, and indeed encountered considerable opposition from the clergy and the judiciary. He did not dare to visit Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire after the vicar there, John Gaule, preached a particularly vehement sermon against witchfinders in April 1646. His book, Discovery of Witches, was published in self-defence after he was questioned by the Norfolk Assize judges. 76 He was ordered to stop the ordeal of floating witches in 1645, and retired in 1646. 77

Political and Social Pressures Producing Salem Witch Hunt

Similarly the view of some historians that the murderous witch hunt at Salem was due to authoritarianism, pietism, revelation, dogma and moralism overriding reason and logic in New England Puritanism, this view has also been challenged. 78 There were strong sociological pressures operating in Massachusetts to produce the general anxiety that promotes the development of witch hunts. The British government had attempted to establish the Anglican Church and appoint the governor, as well as extending the franchise to the propertied members of every Protestant denomination. These measures not only attacked the basis of the Puritan theocracy, but also the tradition of self-government by which the colony had been appointing its own governors since its foundation fifty years previously. 79 The colonies were also at war with the French and there was unrest amongst the Indians. Taxes had been increased to intolerable levels and the colony had suffered from attacks by pirates and small pox. 80 It has also been suggested that the colony had lost its social cohesion in the face of the external threat of the American wilderness as this had retreated with extension of the frontier. 80 Despite this, the New England Puritans were strongly committed to science and reason. Amongst Cotton Mather’s works is The Christian Philosopher, in which science is used to illustrate Christian morality. Gravity, for example, provided Mather with profound experimental evidence of God’s operation in the world.

‘I am continually entertained with weighty body, or matter tending to the center of gravity; or attracted by matter. I feel it in my own. The cause of this tendency, ’tis the glorious GOD! Great GOD, Though givest this matter such a tendency; Thou keepest it in its operation! There is no other cause for gravity, but the will and work of the glorious GOD. I am now effectually convinced of that ancient confession, and must effectuously make it, ‘He is not far from everyone of us.’ 81

In fact the colonists had attempted to use science to examine the case. The supposedly bewitched girls who made the accusations were examined by the town physician, Dr. Griggs, who tried his remedies and consulted his medical texts. Unable to find a non-supernatural explanation, Grigg concluded that their condition was outside the realm of science and that in his view they were bewitched. ‘Given the stage of medical knowledge at the time, this was not an unreasonable assumption.’ 82 The credibility of the girls’ accusation depended on the acceptance of ‘spectral evidence’ – their testimony that they were being tormented by spirits and had supernaturally witnessed those they accused active in their magic. This was controversial, and many Puritan ministers were strongly opposed to it. Increase Mather stated that ‘spectral evidence’ should not be used as the basis for convictions, and stated that ‘it were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person should be condemned…. It is better a guilty person should be absolved, than that he should without ground of conviction be condemned. I had rather judge a witch to be an honest woman, than judge an honest woman as a witch.’ 83 When the Massachusetts General Court called for a fast and a convocation of ministers to decide the best course of action over the accusations, 14 prominent Puritan ministers condemned the use of ‘spectral evidence’. 84 The credibility of the ‘spectral evidence’ was already strongly damaged by the sheer number and respectability of many of the accused. It was almost totally discredited when it was pointed out that in the Bible Satan had also appeared as the prophet Samuel. This would mean that if the visions the girls reported were not of the accused themselves, but of Satan in the guise of the accused, then the prosecution would have no case at all. As a result, the magistrates on the Supreme Court of Judicature refused to allow ‘spectral evidence’ except in marginal cases. The witch hunted ended with all except three of the 52 people tried acquitted. Those three were then issued with a reprieve by Governor Phips, who issued a general pardon for those still under suspicion and released the remaining prisoners from gaol. 85 In fact Puritans as a whole did not indulge in repression on a grand scale, and the Salem witch hunt was uncharacteristic of Puritan conduct. 86 The Salem witch hunt is therefore less the result of Puritanism than of 17th century attitudes to witchcraft generally, caused by a the girls’ behaviour that the science of the time could not explain.

Secular Courts also Involved in Prosecution of Witches

It was not only only the Inquisition and the episcopal courts that were active persecuting witches in the Middle Ages. Secular courts were also involved in trying witches long before the fifteenth century and to almost as great an extent. 87 The parlement of Paris, which supervised the enactment of French law, considered magic a civil crime, so that throughout the Middle Ages cases of sorcery were tried in the secular courts. Similar views prevailed in England, so that the accusations of witchcraft against Alice Perrers, the mistress of Edward III, were first made in parliament. 88

Existence of Magicians in Medieval Christian Society

While it is debatable whether the witch cult described by the inquisitors, theologians and legal authorities actually existed, historians have rejected the idea that it was a surival of paganism. If the evidence is to believed, it also appears that some of the heresies investigated by the Church came very close to witchcraft, such as the Luciferans of the 14th century, who appear to have worshipped the Devil. 89 There was also a clerical underworld of necromancy within the Church itself, which conjured and invoked spirits and demons to work magic. Medieval necromancy manuals include the Book of Consecrations and the Sworn Book, supposedly written by Honorius, son of Euclid of Thebes. 90 These manuals certainly contained destructive spells, such as to cause death or hatred between friends. Historians studying them have stated that the amoral and destructive aspects of these manuals can make one sympathetic to the inquisitors who condemned them. 91 Rather than these magicians constituting a separate, non-Christian faith persecuted by the Church, many of them appear to considered themselves Christians. The Sworn Book, for example, claimed that it was written to protect magic from persecution by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which it considers were inspired by demons who wished to corrupt and conquer the entire universe. Both the Sworn Book and the Ars Notaria were largely Christian in their worldview, invoking the Holy Trinity and the Virgin Mary as well as angels, spirits and demons to accomplish its miracles. 92 If there were no witches as imagined by the inquisitors, there certainly were sorcerers and magicians, some of whom believed they had the power and materials to work black magic.

Opposition to Witch Hunts Based on Scriptural View of Witchcraft

The witch hunts stopped with the increase of scepticism towards magic and the presence of demons in the world. While a powerful source of the scepticism was the new materialist philosophy that denied the existence of incorporeal substances, this scientific view of witchcraft reinforced theological objections based on the Bible. Indeed, ‘the sceptical argument was not necessarily linked to any new assumptions about the natural world. On the contrary much of the debate was deliberately conducted within a framework of Protestant fundamentalism. The leading sceptical writers – Reginald Scot, Samuel Harsnet, Sir Robert Filmer, Thomas Ady, John Wagstaffe, John Webster, Francis Hutchinson – all urged that the ‘continental’ conception of witchcraft as devil-worship was unacceptable because it had no Biblical justification.’ 93 Sceptics of witchcraft like Webster argued that any belief regarding witches that could not be found in scripture was to be rejected. 94 The sceptics argued that the witches of the Old Testament had not been devil worshippers, but merely wizards and diviners. When they harmed their enemies, it was through poisons and other natural methods. Most of the were frauds who deserved punishment for their deceit, but not for the non-existent pacts they had made with Satan. The mythology of witchcraft, with nocturnal flights, pacts with the Devil and Sabbaths, was an invention. 95 The witch hunters had never stated that all misfortune was the product of witchcraft. Rather, witchcraft was only to be suspected after natural causes had been excluded. This raised the problem of how an exclusively supernatural cause for the affliction – witchcraft – could ever be identified. The London preacher, John Manningham, remarked on this in 1603. In 1697 the former Secretary for Scotland remarked that ‘the Parlements of France and other judicatories who are persuaded of the being of witches never try them now, because of the experience they have had that it is impossible to distinguish possession from nature in disorder; and they choose rather to let the guilty escape than to punish the innocent.’ 96

Decline of Prosecutions Not Due to Scepticism but Inability to Prove Charge

The judges and jurors who brought the witch trials to an end were, however, not necessarily sceptical of the existence of witches per se, but simply aware of the logical difficulties of proving it in a particular case. 96 Furthermore, the move away from the prosecution of witchcraft based on black magic to its prosecution on the basis of the supposed pact the witch made with the Devil, as stipulated by the 1604 Witchcraft Act, made the courts increasingly strict in the standards of proof demanded for prosecution. Proof of witchcraft was the existence of a familiar, the presence of the Devil’s mark and a confession from the witch that they had made a pact with the Devil. However, the suspect familiar could be merely an ordinary domestic animal, the Devil’s mark merely a natural excrescence and the confession a fantasy caused by melancholy. The severer view of witchcraft introduced by the 1604 legislation led to an increase in acquittals for witchcraft, as confessions could not be obtained without the use of torture as sanctioned on the continent. 98 Juries on witch trials could reject the charge of witchcraft on the grounds that the victim was a fraud, or suffering from a natural illness that could be identified by a better doctor. They also objected to charges of witchcraft on the grounds that, even if the disease was supernatural in origin, it could come directly from the Devil and not from the supposed witch. They would also acquit if it had not been proved that the witch was malicious towards the victim, or the witnesses for the prosecution were unreliable and when the supposed witch regularly went to church and had solid morals. Thus, ‘the mounting rate of acquittals was the work of tribunals which did not deny the possibility of witchcraft as such, but were perplexed by the impossibility of getting certain proof of it in any particular case.’ 99 Much of the scepticism towards witchcraft also came not from any change in worldview, but from personal experience of fraudulent accusations of witchcraft. The celebrated sceptic of witchcraft, Reginald Scot, took up the case against it because of the spate of fraudulent accusations he had personally seen in Kent. In France the prosecution of witches ceased after a series of scandals involving such fraud. 100 These included the notorious case of Marthe Brossier, who from 1598 to her arrest in April 1599 for fraud pursued a career travelling through France as a victim of demonic possession and being repeatedly exorcised and returned to her senses. Examined in prison, the doctors found her to be a fraud with a little genuine illness. 101

Christian Conception of Ordered Universe as Cause for Decline in Witch Hunts

Another major factor in the growth of scepticism towards witchcraft was the increasing philosophical and theological conception of the universe as regular and orderly. Although this view was considerably reinforced by the new, empirical science, it was also very much the product of theology, which saw God ordering the universe through natural causes that were accessible to the human intellect. 102 Thus witchcraft was impossible, according to the sceptic, John Webster, because it was ‘simply impossible for either the Devil of witches to change or alter the course that God hath set in nature’. 103 In some ways, this sixteenth and seventeenth century scepticism was similar to the scepticism of the early Middle Ages that rejected magic because only God could work miracles. Historians have also noted that much of the scepticism towards witchcraft actually derived not from philosophical materialism, but from the revival of Neo-Platonic natural magic that allowed the effects of black magic to be ascribed to a wider range of natural phenomena, such as action at a distance and the sympathy-antipathy laws connecting the microcosm to the macrocosm, than were available within the Aristotelian worldview. 104 Thus before the scientific revolution disenchanted the cosmos, sceptics of witchcraft like Webster could reject it because their conception of nature also included what would otherwise be considered the supernatural, such as astral spirits, satyrs, pygmies, mermaids and sea-monsters. 105

Humane Motives of Opponents of Witch Hunts including Christian Clergy

Much of the opposition to the witch hunts also came from people concerned about the way the fabric of their societies was being destroyed, and innocent people prosecuted and executed. The Jesuit Heinrich Turck of Paderborn remarked ‘Some people began to feel great sympathy for the unfortunate victims; and grave doubts were raised as to whether the many persons who perished in the flames were really guilty and deserving of so horrible a death. In fact, many people thought that this treatment of human beings, who had been bought with the precious blood of Christ, was cruel and more than barbaric’. 106 Thus much of the opposition to the witch hunts, at least as witnessed in Germany by Turck, came from Christian sympathy with the victims. Many of these opponents of the witch-hunts were members of the clergy. Francis Hutchinson, who later became bishop of Down, was motivated to write his Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft of 1718 after witnessing the condemnation and subsequent reprieve in 1712 of Jane Wenham of Hertfordshire. He visited her after her release, and was personally convinced of her piety and innocence. 107 

In Germany, the Jesuit priest similarly voiced his opposition to the witch hunts in his Cautio Criminalis of 1631. Spee had originally been a supporter of the witch hunts, until the Duke of Brunswick had a suspected witch tortured in his presence. The Duke of Brunswick vehemently condemned torture and had it outlawed throughout his territories. The suspected witch was deliberately tortured to demonstrate the horror of the process itself, and unreliability of the evidence obtained from it, so that she confessed not only to attending the Sabbath, but also seeing Spee and another priest there. According to her testimony, produced through this torture, Spee and his clerical companion had turned into animals and had sex with the other witches, who then gave birth to bizarre monsters. This shocked Spee so much that he reversed his support for the witch hunts and became an ardent opponent. 108

Conclusion: Witch Hunts Product of General Human Belief in Magic and Desire to Find Conspiratorial Source of Evil, in Middle Ages Elaborated but also Brought to End through Christian Theology

The use of force, torture, violence and execution to enforce religious or ideological conformity is indefensible. However, the medieval witch hunts were the product of a general belief in the power of magic to harm and kill that predated Christianity and which Christianity shared with other cultures. Witch hunting and the punishment of black magic was not confined to the Church, but occurred throughout society. While it is doubtful whether there ever were witches who actually worshipped the Devil, people, both lay and clergy, did use magic, real or imagined. The witch hunts of the High and later Middle Ages and 16th and 17th centuries were a response to the perception that witchcraft and magic were increasing and a real and ever-present threat, partly produced through societal, economic and intellectual pressures and strains. In this sense the medieval witch hunts were part of the same human psychological process that in modern, secular society saw lives and reputations destroyed through baseless accusations of a vast Communist conspiracy in the West, and in the Communist block of paranoid notions of vast conspiracies of capitalist and imperialist spies and saboteurs.

The witch hunters themselves were not necessarily scientifically illiterate, nor illogical. They were acting within the logic or their own worldview and scientific knowledge of the time. The perception of some of the religious groups commonly associated with witch hunting and religious bigotry as scientifically illiterate seems unfounded. The Puritans, for example, were strongly interested in science and actively involved in its promotion. As for the treatment of the accused, while the medieval Inquisition rightly deserves condemnation, its successor in the 16th century was far more humane and progressive in its treatment of those accused than most secular courts. It’s an horrific indictment of the 20th century that an accused witch probably received better treatment at the hands of the Holy Office in the 17th century than the millions tortured and butchered by murderous regimes of the Left and Right.

Finally, while the end of the witch hunts was greatly assisted by the rise of modern scientific scepticism, this was not the cause of the decline in the persecution of witches. From the early Middle Ages onwards there was a tradition of theological scepticism about witchcraft, based on the belief that only God could work miracles, and that any that appeared to be performed by demons were illusory. The Biblical scholarship of the 16th century convinced many theologians that the medieval ideas of witchcraft were unfounded, and that any witches who believed they could work magic were deluded. The belief in a regular, ordered cosmos that underpins modern science was the product of Christian theology, a theology that considered that it was impossible for the Devil to disrupt the operation of a such divinely established order. The prosecutions also failed through judges and jurors finding the evidence presented inadequate to support prosecutions, and an awareness of fraud by supposed victims and accusers. The opponents of witch hunting included Christian clergymen and lay people motivated by notions of Christian sympathy with the accused and theologically opposed to false and destructive notions of the power of magic and witchcraft. Thus while the witch hunts were a product of a religious desire to destroy real, supernatural forces in the world, their end was also due to a continuing tradition of theological scepticism about the ability of demons to affect God’s world and human sympathy with those so accused, often motivated by a sense of humanity and justice informed by Christianity.

Notes

1. Jean Claude Bologne, trans. Marta Jacober, Magie and Aberglaube im Mittelalter: von der Fackel zum Scheiterhaufen (Magic and Superstition in the Middle Ages: from the Torch to the Stake) (Dusseldorf, Patmos Verlag 2003), p. 8.

2. Bologne, Magie and Aberglaube, p. 9.

3. P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed. and trans. The Occult in Medieval Europe (Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan 2005), p. 5.

4. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult, p. 5.

5. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult, p. 6.

6. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult, p. 1.

7. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult, p. 1.

8. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, Cornell University Press 1972), pp. 7-8.

9. Russel, Witchcraft, p. 30.

10. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 31.

11. Lois Martin, The History of Witchcraft (Harpenden, Pocket Essentials 2002), p. 84.

12. Martin, History of Witchcraft, p. 85.

13. Martin, History of Witchcraft, pp. 84-5.

14. Martin, History of Witchcraft, p. 84.

15. ‘Witchcraft’ in J. Simpson and S. Roud, The Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford, OUP 2000), p. 395.

16. O.R. Gurney, The Hittites (London, Penguin Books 1990), p. 135.

17. Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds – A Collection of Ancient Texts (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press 2000), p. 19.

18. Luck, Arcana Mundi, p. 61.

19. Russell, Witchcraft, pp. 56-7.

20. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 58.

21. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 61.

22. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 69.

23. Russell, Witchcraft, pp. 72-3.

24. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 73.

25. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 65, 126-7. 

26. Russell, Witchcraft, pp. 76-7.

27. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 115.

28. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 147.

29. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 207.

30. Bologne, Magie and Aberglaube, p. 100.

31. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 200.

32. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 171.

33. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 155.

34. A. Rebecca Cardozo,’ A Modern American Witch-Craze’, in Max Marwick, ed., Witchcraft and Sorcery (London, Penguin Books 1982), p. 469.

35. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 271.

36. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 272.

37. Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend (Chicago, Open Court 1993), pp. 47-9.

38. Victor, Satanic Panic, pp. 49-50.

39. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 153.

40. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 150.

41. Russel, Witchcraft, p. 151.

42. John Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law and the Witch’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, Clarendon 1990), p. 84.

43. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, pp. 83-4.

44. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 84.

45. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 86.

46. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 92.

47. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 93.

48. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 93.

49. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 94-5.

50. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 95.

51. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 96.

52. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 96.

53. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 98-9.

54. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 100.

55. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 102.

56. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 103.

57. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 104.

58. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 104.

59. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 105.

60. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 106.

61. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 107.

62. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 108.

63. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, pp. 108-9.

64. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 110.

65. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 110.

66. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 111.

67. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen, Early Modern European Witchcraft, p. 115.

68. ‘Witchcraft’ in Simpson and Roud, English Folklore, p. 395.

69. ‘Witchcraft’ in Simpson and Roud, English Folklore, p. 395.

70. Derek Shorrock, Bishop Still’s Visitation 1594 and the ‘Smale Booke’ of the Clerks of the Peace for Somerset 1593-5 (Taunton, Somerset Record Society 1978).

71. R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press 1973), p. 143.

72. Hooykaas, Religion and Rise of Science, p. 144.

73. Hooykaas, Religion and Rise of Science, p. 148.

74. Christina Hole, Witchcraft in England (London, Fitzhouse Books 1977), p. 80; Martin, History of Witchcraft, p. 67; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, Penguin Books 1971), p. 597.

75. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 597.

76. Hole, Witchcraft in England, p. 82.

77. Martin, History of Witchcraft, p. 69.

78. Joyce Bednarski, ‘The Salem Witch-Scare Viewed Sociologically’ in Marwick, Witchcraft and Sorcery, p. 200.

79. Bednarski, ‘Salem Witch-Scare’, in Marwick, Witchcraft and Sorcery, p. 196.

80. Roger Hart, Witchcraft (Hove, Wayland 1971), p. 112.

81. Bednarski, ‘Salem Witch-Scare’, in Marwick, Witchcraft and Sorcery, p. 197.

82.David Levin, ‘Essays to Do Good for the Glory of God: Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius‘ in Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press1974), p. 152.

83. Bednarski, ‘Salem Witch-Scare’ in Marwick, Witchcraft and Sorcery, p. 192; Hart, Witchcraft, p. 116.

84. Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments against Anti-Religious Bigotry (San Francisco, Encounter Books 2002), p. 182.

85. Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments against Anti-Religious Bigotry (San Francisco, Encounter Books 2002), p. 182.

86. Bednarski, ‘Salem Witch-Hunt’, Marwick, Witchcraft and Sorcery, p. 194.

87. Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments against Anti-Religious Bigotry (San Francisco, Encounter Books 2002), p. 182.

88. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 199.

89. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 204.

90. Russell, Witchcraft, p. 177.

91. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, p. 163, 170.  

92. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, p. 164.

93. Sophie Page, Magic in Medieval Manuscripts (London, the British Library 2004), pp. 44-5.

94. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 681.

95. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 681.

96. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 682.

97. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 685.

98. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 686.

99. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 687.

100. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 688.

101. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 689.

102.  P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witch-Hunters: Professional Prickers, Unwitchers & Witch Finders of the Renaissance (Stroud, Tempus 2003), p. 80.

103. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 689-90.

104. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 690.  

105. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 691.

106. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 691.

107. Hart, Witchcraft, p. 85.

108. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 689.

109. Martin, History of Witchcraft, p. 60.