More lies: Atomic energy will be too cheap to meter. Salvage cutting will save our old-growth forests. "Killer trees" create more air pollution than cars.
Why do people lie? Some people lie to win. If this proves ineffective, they discredit their opposition, labeling them lunatics or traitors. The art of slandering enemies has always been with us but rose to a high art with the inquisitions of the Renaissance. Modern witches would do well to avoid the temptation to wax too pious about the legends of the Burning Times. As the song says, nine million dead. Tragically romantic, but the number is probably inflated.
I do believe that many were killed for the crime of heresy. Some were witches; others were Jews, homosexuals, the poor, the old, ugly, powerless, dirty, ignorant or mentally ill.
Does this list look familiar? Heresy didn't die with the Enlightenment. Differences in appearance, race and religion are still the strongest bait for raising a mob. The pack mentality we share with animals, our willingness to follow, is manipulated by politicians and the press the way a shaman controls the wind. The persecuted are always issued an apology after it's too late to bring them back from the flames.
Most who were burned or drowned, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, were not witches, not in the moon-loving, wand-waving sense of the word. They were punished for telling the truth: that they were innocent. When they finally lied and admitted their guilt under torture, they were destroyed as heretics, because they couldn't be condemned unless they confessed. If we empathize with anything from those terrible times, a wise choice would be to acknowledge that the cruelest test we can face is to be falsely accused.
The 1400s through the 1600s saw the Roman Catholic church turn its doctrines upside down to accommodate the war on witches and heretics. Prior to this time, the medieval church did not persecute witches, because according to church law, they didn't exist. (To believe that Satan was more powerful than God was a dualist heresy that the church had suppressed during the first millennium.) The medieval Church still punished witches and other heretics, but in numbers far smaller than the thousands who were condemned in the Renaissance. The Catholic Church had always associated witches with devils, but when Renaissance Catholics made Satan as powerful as God, witches were suddenly everywhere. Behind this alleged epidemic of witches was an economic reality that threatened both the Catholic and Protestant churches, who were now competing for souls and profits.
Gradually, the church was pressured into contradicting its own laws by ambitious priests who sought to control nonconformists and consolidate church power. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull, or decree, that witchcraft had become a plague that must be stopped. This document was commissioned by Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, Dominican inquisitors who wanted papal approval for their guide to heresy, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches). Published in 1486, it was the first how-to guide to witch-hunting. The title page warned "To disbelieve in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies," proving how much church doctrine had changed. (When the Malleus was reissued in the 1920s, it was edited by Montague Summers, a defrocked priest who compared witches to Bolsheviks, since both were troublemakers bent on treason. In that context, the Malleus was once again seen as a tool for restoring order to a world gone mad with political and economic change.)
The Dominican order pressured church leaders into giving them control over prosecuting witches and heretics. The order was built on the belief in witchcraft, and its members reaped the rewards of prosecuting as many heretics as possible. Enriching themselves on the confiscated wealth of well-to-do heretics, they also helped the church grow fat.
The Malleus Maleficarum was used to convict heretics in both civil and church trials. The wild fantasies in its pages caused thousands to be accused of having sex with the Devil. Other common crimes included shape-shifting, travel by night and renouncing Christ. Victims of demonic harassment were blamed for their troubles, since demons bothered only the weak and lustful in their beds: "Those who are given to lust, the Devil has power over them." Demons and witches also induced hallucinations in those who had not achieved a state of grace.
In their paranoia about lust and its results, the Church decided that midwifery was a demonic profession. "Midwives are especially wicked.... No one does more harm to the Catholic faith." Baby girls could be dedicated to the Devil from the moment of their birth. First-born males were said to be roasted and made into charms that guaranteed a witch silence under torture. Worst of all, midwives could perform abortions.
Kramer and Sprenger pondered why more women than men fell under the influence of Satan. To them, the reasons were obvious: "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable. To fulfill their lusts they consort even with devils.... No matter for wonder that more women than men are infected with the heresy of witchcraft."
Men had stronger minds, but although they were less likely to conspire with the Devil, they could still become unwilling pawns if they did not guard their seed. A man's nocturnal emissions could be stolen off the sheets by demons and planted into any number of women or beasts, making him party to the sin of artificial insemination.
Witches were capable of stealing a man's penis as well: "And what then of witches who sometimes collect male sex organs, as many as twenty or thirty together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves, eating corn and oats?" When one victim demanded the return of his member, "she told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, that he might take which he liked out of a nest. When he tried to take a big one, the witch said: 'You must not take that one, because it belongs to a parish priest.'"
History praises the Renaissance as a grand revival of the wisdom of Greece and Rome. Unfortunately, the judicial torture practiced under Roman law was revived as well. This use of torture for crimes other than high treason must certainly be the source of the wild and unbelievable confessions that led whole villages to be burned at the stake.
In Catholic terms, a heretic was a baptized church member who rejected God in favor of the Devil or any non-Catholic belief. Anything that insulted God was a punishable error. Those who merely sinned in ignorance were usually offered the chance to perform penance. Errors were the responsibility of the accused, since God allowed the Devil and his army of witches to test his Christian flock. The far greater error, the one punishable by death, was to cause harm or death using the secrets of Satan.
To believe that God was imperfect was an error. God allowed evil, but not because he was imperfect. God didn't like the Devil, but he allowed him to roam the earth in hopes of perfecting the universe: "The work of witches proves the faith of the just." God also allowed suffering: "Out of the persecution of tyrants comes the patience of the martyrs." Only God could heal or cause physical change. "The Devil, by moving the inner perceptions, effects changes." These changes did not cause pain. They were only illusions. "But the Devil can do none of these things without permission from God. With God's permission, witches confuse those who do not trust in God."
Examining a witch was an unpleasant job. Although a judge must never allow the witch to touch him, others were free to conduct strip-searches to uncover amulets that might be sewn to the witch's body, protecting them from physical harm.
Witches could not be convicted unless they were tortured. Inquisitors claimed the toughest witches could laugh off pain. Since witches had spells that protected them from pain, torture became more severe. Devices that separated and crushed limbs, gouged eyeballs and nailed tongues to walls, along with rape and sexual abuse, were "engines of inquiry."
Once a witch confessed (no one questioned why their spell against pain failed), they were forced to name others. In some parts, witches were set afire as a test, because of the belief that they would not burn. There was also the trial by water, a lose-lose situation: If you sank, you were innocent. You were also dead. To float, and live, meant guilt and death. Some under torture chose the trial by red-hot rod: If you carried the rod, you were freed. (This last option was later retired when some inquisitors decided that a witch's glamour could help them win the contest.)
Evidence against witches was normally circumstantial. Witnesses to acts of witchcraft and treason were often shielded from testifying, to protect them from reprisal. There were many clues of guilt: "If she be a witch, she will not be able to weep." The guilt of the accused is still assessed in this way by the press, based on the amount of emotion and remorse displayed while on trial.
Today, we can still defeat our enemies by demonizing them. While heresy is a word that has fallen out of favor, demonology is alive and well in the political world. Richard Nixon saw demons all around him. He maintained a list of enemies, which included almost every newspaper publisher in the country, even though the majority were politically conservative. Ronald Reagan maintained a similar list. The Soviet Union became Reagan's Evil Empire, helping the defense industry grow rich. General Manuel Noriega laundered money for the CIA when he wasn't ruling Panama. When Noriega's activities became too embarrassing for George Bush, the president accused his friend of drug-dealing and devil-worship. The pounds of cocaine the army captured from the general's freezer turned out to be tamales. Not missing a chance to justify a military invasion, the U.S. Army's occult expert told People magazine that these were black magic tamales, or trabajos, used to curse Noriega's enemies. (And of course, th e general found sanctuary in a church.)
According to Rush Limbaugh, if you don't believe that President Clinton is a drug dealer and Hillary Clinton a lesbian, something is wrong with you. Thousands believe Limbaugh, but he can't cough up the evidence. If you cross him, you're a lesbian too. The King James Bible's warning "Do not suffer a witch to live" has now been translated by some groups to include homosexuals. Same ideology, different victim.
The Roman Catholic church of the inquisitions believed in free will. "It is part of Divine providence that every creature shall be left to its own nature." But the church punished free will when it didn't agree with the results.
"Wickedness is a personal responsibility, not the Devil's." This bit of Malleus wisdom refutes the modern call for censorship, which is not a conservative political principle. Even Newt Gingrich sees the "error" in censoring the Internet, although Slade Gorton is determined to score points with the Christian Coalition by attacking a problem that doesn't really exist.
Paranoia proves that older isn't necessarily better. Militia members have dusted off the Jew-hatred of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and the commie-conspiracy theories of the Fabulous 50s, hoping you'll look the other way the next time they shoot a Forest Service employee. If you don't agree with them, you're just another Bolshevik.
When the Vatican isn't involved in banking scandals, it's building telescopes on a sacred mountain in Arizona. Galileo's error is rarely mentioned when Vatican spokesmen defend their partnership with the University of Arizona to destroy Mt. Graham, home to plants and animals found nowhere else on earth. The White Mountain Apache tribe has pleaded with the federal courts to protect their birthplace from bulldozers. When Earth First! protested on the tribe's behalf, a Jesuit museum director accused them of Jewish conspiracy.
Cycles of heresy revolve around changing attitudes and freedom of thought. The Biblical teachings of the Puritan nation are now heretical when taught in public schools. But this may change again. Sex education is still considered taboo. It's part of a public school curriculum that teaches the mechanics, but no decision-making skills beyond the promise to abstain. Part, but not all, of the truth is sanctioned as correct.
"Those who are deluded are lacking in divine grace." If we heed this warning from our ancestors, then it must be our divine duty to always speak the full truth. The corollary is that we must be on our guard against false accusations of heresy, in any of its forms, because the wildest stories may be the ones that are believed.
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