Posted on 04/15/2022 10:49:41 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
I think killing witches was more a form of enforcing law than a ritualistic killing (appeasing spirits or gods).
Various forms of execution would be a subject that could take a lot of grusome forms as well.
The murder of people who were obviously not witches is not a form of enforcing law, unless one counts shariah.
I had a professor whose hobby was researching witch killings. He said most of them were in Germany (16th-17th centuries) and had trials associated with them. He thought the great motivator was that the women (majority were elderly women) were widows who owned property. Whether they were obviously not witches doesn’t really matter if there was an accusation which could be brought to trial.
Since the accusation was BS, it was just murder. Even the blitering a-hole Cotton Mather came to regret his condemnation of the murders of those accused of witchcraft in Salem et al — many years later. None of the false accusations ever resulted in punishment for the perjurers, afaik. Sounds like the events of the past five years.
Yeah that was his implication. He thought the German accusers knew they were lying. That makes it murder.
I know the Salem witch trial accusers/prosecution did repent but it’s not clear to me that the accusations weren’t just the result of hysteria rather than malice. Wasn’t Cotton Mather a believer in spectral evidence?
We do see that kind of hysteria now. The daycare child abuse trials were very recent.
Cotton Mather was a full-bore demagogue, who later thought that what he'd done was just a mistake.
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