The enlightened emergence from the medieval Dark Ages. The Reformation. The Renaissance. An undeniably high point of human evolution. Or so we are taught, and so many believe, but to my people -- the Pagans, the Witches, the wise women and men, the healers, the midwives -- it was Europe’s fall into paranoia and intolerance, the Inquisition, the Burning Times, a Holocaust in which up to 9 million people (85% of them women) were killed for the "sin" of Witchcraft.

In the year 1484, a papal bull by Innocent VIII declared Witchcraft a heresy. In 1486, the Dominican Inquisitors Kramer and Sprenger published the Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of the Witches"), which became the witchhunter’s manual for the next two and a half centuries. Anyone -- especially a woman -- could be accused of being a Witch, which was defined as a special crime to which the ordinary laws of evidence did not apply. Once accused, the suspected Witch was subjected to torture -- euphemistically called "the Question" -- for weeks on end (except in England, where torture was banned, but starvation, sleep deprivation and gang-rape where not considered torture). Standard tortures on the continent included thumbscrews, bootscrews, whips, branding irons, racks, strappado (a pulley to haul the victim into the air by her arms bound behind her back, jerking her up and down until her shoulders dislocated), as well as the English "non-tortures. The inquisitors’ role was to keep on torturing until the victim named many "accomplices," who were then arrested and tortured until more names were given, and so on until whole districts were found guilty. Inquisitors were instructed by their handbooks to give false promises of mercy for the sake of compliance and confession. Victims that didn’t die of gaol fever (typhus) or torture were burned alive at the stake, pressed under rocks, or hanged.

What "sin" could millions of people commit to illicit such abominations against their bodies? Church history is a history of persecution, but it has usually been applied against alien ethnic-religious groups such as Jews, or heretic sects such as the Waldenses and Albigenses. Witches, however, were accused of fantastic and bizarre feats that contradicted reality: social and sexual intercourse with the devil, night flights, turning people into animals, and charming away penises and hiding them in birds’ nests. Perhaps this quote from the era gives us a clue: "If a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a Witch and must die," (of course, women weren’t allowed in medical school then). In addition, Witches had ergot for the pain of labor at a time when the Church held that labor pains were the Lord’s just punishment for Eve’s original sin. Traditional healers were, and are, religious leaders. As such they upheld the values of worth inherent in nature and all living creatures -- values that oppose exploitation. They were focal figures around which communities could organize against Church and government oppression. Perhaps that, more than anything else, is the "sin" inherent in Witchcraft.

The Witch persecutions on healers was an attack on a value system, the same value system that modern Pagans are striving to renew. Although we disagree on many things, most Pagans believe in a single golden rule: "Do what you will, harming none," based on an awareness of the world and everything in it as alive, dynamic, interdependent, and interacting.