Witch-hunts

Easlea, Brian. Witch hunting, magic and the new philosophy an introduction to the debates of the scientific revolution 1450-1750. Sussex Harvester P, 1980. 

NORML reports that every 9 seconds someone gets arrested for marijuana posession. NORML also reports that 28are there for drug related crimes. These people are not dangerous. They are there as victims of a witch hunt. Laws created by the legislature to protect me from myself demonstrate how totalitarian this country has become. 

It is therefore to be expected that, once extensive researches are conducted, many SS-men will yet be found in the German Democratic Republic who, while already proven guilty [sic ], could not be arrested in the Federal Republic of Germany or in Austria. 336 This perpetual witch hunt is made possible by revisions of laws which act retroactively to exacerbate the trial situation of any accused - in other words, according to Henkys, the process is based on an ex post facto (retroactive) law that violates human rights.337... 

I suspected the Maestro could smell another thousand-ducat fee, maybe ten thousand. On the other hand, I did not think he would ever descend to witch hunting. 

A direct example of Thomas s authority may be seen in the work of the well-known bishop of Avila (in modern Castilla-Leon), Alonso Tostado (c. 1400—1455), an important figure in the early stages of the Great Witch Hunt.134 In his extensive commentary to Exodus, Tostado considers the familiar issue of the staffs that Pharaoh s magicians supposedly transmuted... 

But the result of the alchemical art-nature debate was not merely to provide a seed around which the learned world could crystallize into two actively opposed parties. The discussion found in alchemical texts spilled over into other disciplinary venues, where it produced surprising effects. One of these was the literature of the Great Witch Hunt. Some writers in that genre used alchemy to defuse the power of demons and witches, in the tradition of the medieval Canon episcopi with its incredulous view of witchcraft, while others, like the authors of the infamous Malleus malefi-carum, weakened the doctrinal opposition to alchemical transmutation in... 

Cohn, N, 1975. Europe s Inner Demons An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt. The New American Library, NewYorL... 

These universal beliefs and the practices connected with them are the materials out of which men build social movements and institutions. The beliefs that led to the witch-hunts existed long before the thirteenth century, but it was not until then that European society used them as a foundation for an organized movement. This move-... 

Johann Weyer (1515-1588), physician to Duke William of Cleves, was one of the few medical men of his age to speak out against the witch-hunts. Like his contemporaries, Weyer believed in witchcraft and witches he differed from them only in holding that witch-hunters made the diagnosis of witchcraft too often and too readily. He especially attacked the uninformed and unskilled physicians [who] relegate all of the incurable diseases, or all of the diseases the remedy for which they overlook, to witchcraft and concluded that they, the physicians themselves are thus the real malefactors. In short, he did not oppose the witch-hunts themselves, but only their abuses or excesses. ... 

As we have seen, in the days of the witch-hunts, the methods for identifying a person as a poisoner and as a patient differed radically the method for identifying him as a witch differed from both, con-... 

The problem of whp is a fit subject for commitment would like-wise disappear if we regarded inyo untary mental hospitalization as a crime against humanity. The question of who was a fit subject for Burning at tbe stake was answered only when witch-hunting was abandoned. I believe that the question of who is a fit subject for commitment will also be answered only when we abandon the practice of involuntary mental hospitalization. ... 

Although the witch-hunts seem to us today an obvious crime, we... 

Those not taken in by the witch mania recognized, of course, that these marks are both common and natural. Very few people in the world are without privy marks upon their bodies, as moles or stains, even such as witchmongers call the devil s privy marks, wrote Thomas Ady,i an English critic of witch-hunts, in 1656. ... 

Since heresy was neither a social act nor a biological condition but a state of mind, the crime of witchcraft could never have been established if recognized judicial procedure had been followed. The vexing problems of proof were overcome by adopting what has since become known as the inquisitorial method of prosecution, colloquially called witch-hunting. Lea describes the procedure as follows ... 

In short, we may conclude that although the psychiatric theory of witchcraft is worthless for our understanding of the witch-hunts, it is valuable for our understanding of psychiatry and its pivotal concept of mental illness. What is called mental illness (or psychopathology ) emerges as the name of the product of a particular kind of relationship between oppressor and oppressed. 

The modern psychiatric view of the witch as a mentally ill person is not merely a false interpretation of the historical record it is a perverse denial of the true role of the witch as benefactor or therapist as well as malefactor or troublemaker. Because psychiatric interpretations of the witch-hunts consistently neglect the figure of the good witch—also called the white witch (in contrast to the black one), or the wiseman or wisewoman—these accounts must be seen for what they are psychiatric propaganda, not medieval historiography. 

The psychopathological theory of witchcraft is, as we have seen, not the only available or possible explanation of the witch-hunts. The view that witches were society s scapegoats was held by Reginald Scot four hundred years ago, was articulated into a comprehensive and persuasive explanation by Jules Michelet more than one hundred years ago, and was massively documented from original sources by Henry Charles Lea more than fifty years ago. Why then do institutional psychiatrists and psychiatric historians ignore this competing explanation, and prefer instead the view that witches were madwomen An effort to answer this question will help to clarify not only the practical import of these two theories of the witch-craze, but also the nature of Institutional Psychiatry as a modern mass movement. 

Thomas Ady was a foremost English critic of the witch-hunts. His book, A Candle in the Dark (1655), was quoted vainly by the Reverend George Burroughs at his trial in Salem. Ady s attack on the witch mania was two-pronged. On the one hand, he tried to show that contemporary proofs of witchcraft were not based on... 

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