Source: Eden to Eros, by Richard Roberts, 1985

The History Of Witch-hunts

The first millennium of the Christian era was free of witch-hunts and
persecutions of women. No Christian could accuse another Christian of
witchcraft or launching of a witch-hunt. Wilson in his chapter on witchcraft in The
Occult writes:
The infamous Inquisition was born in Toulouse in 1229, and its most
determined agents were Dominicans, who traveled around and reported
heresy wherever they found it.
At all events, the Cathars and Albigenses were bloodily stamped out; the
few survivors withdrew to remote mountain villages, as did the Waldenses
under similar persecution more than two centuries later. Domenic (later St.
Domenic), founder of the Friar Preachers, who established his headquarters
at Toulouse in 1215 vowed to dedicate himself to destroying Catharism. Two
centuries later the Cathars no longer existed, but the Dominican inquisitors
were fulminating against witches whom they called Waldenses, who met
together at Sabbaths or 'valdesia'.
The Dominicans kept asking the Church to give its official sanction to the
crusade against witches, but the Church, denied the existence of witches,
held out for another century. Then, unfortunately, a superstitious paranoiac,
John XXII, became pope. He was convinced that his enemies were plotting
to kill him by magic; so it was he who finally gave way to the Dominican
demand that `sorcery' itself should become a crime, quite apart from the
question of heresy. This was in 1326.

In 1275 a woman was tried at Toulouse on charges of heresy, relations with

a demon, and giving birth to a monster. The woman, age 60, was burned. The
first secular trial on charges of actual witchcraft took place in Paris in 1390.
Wilson continues:

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 A woman was accused of sorcery by a man she had cured when on the
point of death! She said she was not a witch, but that she had simply used
charms, taught to her by another woman, which included `In the name of the
Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost'. Under threats of torture, confined in an
icy and filthy dungeon over the winter months of 1390-91, she finally
'confessed' to having a demon familiar, [hoping to escape.]

For the next four hundred years, torture and execution of women accused of
witchcraft continued. Ultimately the list of victims numbered in the millions.
Wilson continues:
The witch craze was so horrible and so widespread that the human
imagination cannot encompass it. We find it hard enough to envision Hitler's
murder of six million Jews over less than ten years, so it is quite impossible
to imagine a campaign of torture and murder lasting for four centuries. It is
true that witchcraft executions were on a smaller scale than the Nazi
atrocities; but it must be remembered that each witch was tortured
individually.
One seething with moral indignation writes: 'The record of witchcraft is
horrible and brutal, degradation stifled decency, the filthiest passions mas-
queraded under the cover of religion, and man's intellect was subverted to
condone beastialities. Never were so many so wrong, so long.'

Wilson goes on to discuss a number of possible causes for the witchcraft

persecutions, one of which is political: "when the Church wanted to punish a
Protestant populace, it sent Dominican inquisitors.
The beginning of the witchcraft craze corresponded with the Black Death and
the Hundred Years' War. When people are oppressed and miserable, violence
becomes a psychological necessity. And violence is always associated in
puritanical and repressive societies.
Wilson then formulates his theories: "I would regard this as the most
important element in the witch craze, more important than ecclesiastical politics,
or even the persecution of `natural mediums' and clairvoyants.[were to blame
another for ones own shortcomings.] Further, Wilson's theory of female hysteria
lays the groundwork for removing much of the blame from patriarchal society,
and the individual judges and inquisitors in particular.
I would like to suggest yet another theory-male hysteria-to explain the
majority of the cases in the witchcraft craze; yet this hysteria was unique largely
to clerics because their own nature, and their unconscious feminine element

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within the psyche, had been so repressed that an eruption of a distorted nature
could be predicted. Given the kind of negative programming to which the clergy
had been subjected for 1400 years, specifically in regard to the evil and
dangerous nature of women, it was inevitable that the projection of women as
evil (witches) would arise from their individual unconscious, given the collective
projection of evil which the Church had placed on women.

Shadow Elements in the Witchcraft Craze

Certainly the answers lies in psychology. The projections of evil onto women
from Eve's original sin made women fair game for "shadow projection." These
[attack what they] refuse to admit within.
Thus many of the women accused of witchcraft may themselves have
been accused by women. These cases can be explained by the shadow
projection.
This again returns us to the scene of original sin in the Garden of Eden,
wherein Eve is made responsible for Adam's "Fall," or death in the world.
Whereas the shadow is the explanation for women accusing other women of
witchcraft, the unconscious or feminine component in the psyche of man, is
responsible for men accusing women of witchcraft.
The main charge usually made against a witch was that she had cast a
spell on an individual, which was the cause of the illness plaguing that person.
Or, crops and land had been blighted by the witch's spell.
On the world political scene, parallels are apparent to terrorist
organizations. And of course, demonstrations outside the convention halls of
both the Democratic and Republican parties bear out this theory. For the ruling
body of delegates may be likened to the psyche's ego, which thinks itself the only
governing body. Outside consciousness, or outside the convention hall, the
demonstrators are determined to behave just as nastily and to go just as far in
socially unadaptable behavior as the police barriers will permit.
Thus, the more restrictive, puritanical and dehumanizing the religion, the
greater the profusion of witches, since the possession of consciousness by the
shadow element is nothing more or less than the psyche's reaction to a too
narrow attitude on the part of the conscious ego. And this is verified by history,
the 16th and 17th centuries witnessing the greatest number of both individual
witches and collective "possessions."
In the 20th century, it seems to me, there was a collective possession by
the shadow on a national scale, in the form of the National Socialist Party of
Germany, or the Nazis. Hitler spoke directly to the shadow in each German

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psyche by reviving the ancient scapegoat (the Jew) and addressing himself to
the psychically supercharged areas of "Fatherland" and "lost patrimony".
Modernized in the interest of increased acceptability, the Judeo-Christian
tradition has become far too cerebral. As new sects come along demanding
personal sacrifices of their followers and utilizing rhythmic music, bogus miracles,
and charismatic leaders, converts fall easily in line: witness Jonestown and
various other cults. What humankind needs, more than new governments and
new economics, is a new religion, that has built-in safety valves for the shadow
archetype [that women are witches].

Conclusion
According to a German philosopher, Catholicism especially has equated sex
with evil, and women with depravity.
What has happened, in the embodiment of the sacred life principle of Mother
itself, since her fall from deification in cultures? Our journey in patriarchy has
shown that a profound ambivalence took place, in the individual psyches of men
that resulted in a collective, societal ambivalence toward women. On an
individual level, the Great Mother as deity equals the feminine archetype in the
personal unconscious, or for soul.
Because of women's individual link to the greater mystery of nature, her own
power to produce life-or death!-women had a numinous, or supernatually
fascinating effect upon men. And because each man-and woman's-life
depended on rewards from the Great Mother for survival, if she withheld the
blessings of fertility, then the tribe simply died. So she had both benefic and
terrible aspects. Out of this, we may infer, the ambivalence in the male psyche
began, reaching its culmination in the witch craze. But even as the goddess of
love, the totality of the Great Mother's spiritual power of fruition and fertility,
vegetable, animal, and human, the very process upon which life on our planet
depends, was reduced to [an inhuman] object, extolled either as an embodiment
of the virtuous Virgin Mary, or murdered as the dangerous witch/harlot when the
supernatural power of the female was experienced as negative and destructive.

[Continued next page]

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 MOTHER MARY
The 400-Year Sentencing of Women

What is seen here is the persecution of women who were the healers,
often the religious healers who healed in the name of the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. It was a time in which women suffered having been put into dark
dungeons, tried before courts to be tortured, burned at the stake. These records
still remain in the psyche and causes much of the depression seen which will the
another subject in this series.

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