Posted on 04/02/2020 6:52:14 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
The last witch execution that can be documented in the Holy Roman Empire’s illustrious history took place on this date in 1756, in Landshut, during the age of Maria Theresa.* Its subject was a 15-year-old named Veronika Zeritschin, who was beheaded and then burned.
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Germany's witch burnings were much, much greater than those of other European nations. I often wonder what the relationship between this and the Holocaust might be.
“I’m sure most were innocent..”
So you aren’t POSITIVE they were innocent?
Not the last time governments pretended things to be true that aren’t true that resulted in really bad things happening. Others: slavery, holocaust, abortion, pervert marriage.
People dabble in witchcraft now. Satanists exist now. They didn’t then?
“60k people...executed for suspected witchcraft...I’m sure most were innocent”
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So, you think that some of them were “real witches”?
The duck weighed more I guess
She turned me into a newt!
That’s a stretch to equate something from the 1700’s to the Holocaust
Well I got better.
Those fingers in my hair
That sly come-hither stare...
I’m saying people throughout history have engaged in the worship of dark powers as well as the sick rituals that go with that. We use words other than “witches” for them now.
The duck weighed more I guess
It’s a fair cop...
And don’t talk to the audience...
Is it? It’s just a matter of numbers. If you have an insane population that thinks it’s OK to burn 15-year-old girls, how much different is it to burn Jews?
Is it? At the height of the witch hunt frenzy, Germanic areas sometimes used giant ovens for efficiency. Sometimes it only took being a Jew (or being suspected of being one or too friendly with one) to be accused of witchcraft.
Satanism is part of it, but most witches seem to have sold or given away potions and ointments that were based on toxic, mind-altering plant alkaloids, bacteria, or snake venom. Add in spells, incantations, and ceremonies, and the stories of witches’ powers seem more in the nature of drug parties for teens and poisons for the malicious. For many communities, witches were a nuisance and a menace, cloaked in mystery, ugliness, and anti-Christian teachings.
Nancy Pelosi comes to mind.
That’s something I hadn’t thought of - anti-Semitism as a tool of the witch hysteria. I wonder how many Jews were singled out as “witches” by an ignorant, superstitious, and anti-Semitic crowd?
I’m no defender of the Protestant heretics who ascribed supernatural powers to witches. But 60,000 in Germany is an exaggeration. Wikipedia cites 50,000 throughout all of Europe, and their sources suggest fewer still. Its sources are all very modern, and none very scholarly seeming. “Ronald Hutton,” for instance, wrote in “The Pomegranete, the International Journal of Pagan Studies, “ in an article subtitled, “A Personal View.” Even such sources (e as that seem to point to 17,000 German cases, extrapolated from 8,000 known cases, or 12,000 known cases throughout the Western world. (republished at http://www.summerlands.com/crossroads/remembrance/current.htm )
Hutton acknowledges that the well-recorded witch trials of the North were much larger and more numerous than the “small” trials of the South, but still references an estimate several times larger than the recorded trials of the North.
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