![]() In Weyer’s view, any confession to a pact made with the devil was a delusion caused by unbalanced humours, old-age infirmity, and female hysteria. Weyer did not go as far to say this in the 16 th century, but he did argue that the perception of witchcraft was merely a product of female senility and demonic trickery. The ageism and sexism of witch-hunts prompted a writer for the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1963 to call Malleus ‘one of the worst documents of bigotry of our Western civilisation’. By the end of the 16 th century, the Church had taken an ever more punitive stance towards witches, and public persecution, trials and executions had significantly escalated, with the majority of victims being older women. Johann Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum, & incantationibus ac veneficiis (‘On the Illusions of the Demons and on Spells and Poisons’ first published Basel, 1563 – Queens’ copy is the 1577 edition) was the first major assault on the medieval portrayal of witchcraft established by Malleus. Johann Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum Īn engraved frontispiece portrait of Johann Weyer holding a human skull in De praestigiis daemonum. Most importantly, in its final part, Malleus called for extermination of those who made satanic pacts, and sanctioned torture as a method for extracting confessions. Due to the relatively recent invention of printing, Kraemer and Sprenger’s ideas spread, and within 50 years of leaving the press, the witch conceptualised by Malleus was widely adopted as the learned definition. She would fly to nocturnal meetings with the devil, offer him the souls of babies, copulate with demons, poison the community and transform herself into an animal, among other evil acts. Kraemer and Sprenger saw Satan as a more remote, God-like entity, and the witch was an agent of his power on Earth, made so by signing a diabolic pact. At this point, there had generally been no consensus on what exactly witchcraft was, with competing conceptions based on traditional belief prominent in different regions of Europe. Pope Innocent VIII had charged its authors, German clergymen Heinrich Kraemer and Johann Sprenger, to eradicate witchcraft in Germany. The foundations of this debate are laid in the late medieval period with the publication of Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) in 1486. Similar imagery of idolatry, horned demons and child sacrifice was attributed to witches in the late medieval period. ![]() An illustration from Jacques Gaffarel’s Curiositates Inauditae (Hamburg, 1706) depicting Moloch, an idol worshipped by the ancient Ammonites, in which it is believed children were burned in sacrifice.
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