The first English translation of the 1489 edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, which was translated by the Rev. Montague Summers, is being auctioned on eBay. This is the edition which we have replicated here on this web site. If you’re a book collector and have an interest in The Inquisition or the Occult, this is simply a must-have.

According to the owner, this edition was published by John Rodker of London in 1928. There were 1,275 numbered copies in this edition, this book being number 79. Red leatherette at the spine, gilt titling to spine, gilt decoration on front cover, 277 pages with no illustrations. Front hinge is cracked and there is a slight bowing of the boards. Rubbed boards. Tight binding. Rough uncut fore edge pages as called for.

None of us can afford original editions of the Malleus Maleficarum. They’re scattered about the world in museums and private collections. But here’s an opportunity to own at least the first English translation of the work. A more accurate translation has since been published by Dr. Christopher Mackay, but the Summers translation will always bear a historical significance.

National Geographic

For the first time ever, an international investigation team joins forces to unravel the mysteries of the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches. Written in 1486, this infamous medieval manual changed the way the Western world saw evil. With detailed instructions on how to find, prosecute and punish witches, the Malleus inspired centuries of accusation and bloodshed on both sides of the Atlantic.

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SUN MAY 9, 2010 – 10P

THE HAMMER OF THE WITCHES

One of the most controversial and infamous texts of all time, The Hammer of the Witches put many innocent people to death. But who wrote this book? What did it say? And how did it convince so many people of the dangers of witchcraft?

THE HAMMER

• The witch hunter’s bible was referred to in Latin as the Malleus Maleficarum, which translates to mean The Hammer of the Witches.
• This text was written in 1486, published in 1487, and consisted of 256 pages of facts proving that witches were real and must be killed.
• Between the 16th and 17th centuries, researchers speculate that over 30,000 copies were in circulation throughout Europe, during which an estimated 60,000 “witches” were put to death.
• The text contains three separate sections: the first is a philosophical explanation of witches’ existence, the second is a clergy guide to recognize a witch, and the third is a legal manual for the accusation, persecution, and death penalty for witchcraft.

THE MAN WITH THE HAMMER

• A man named Heinrich Kramer, one of the most infamous witch hunters in history, eventually became the author of The Hammer of the Witches. His initial motivation for writing the text was to prove his theory to many of his critics because he had, thus far, failed as a witch hunter.
• The most powerful endorsement the Hammer ever saw was the Papal Bull, a document signed by the Pope himself stating an official church opinion, making it the only book on witchcraft to receive this approval.
• It is said that in order to persuade the Pope to condone the Hammer of the Witches, Kramer brought him a sum of money.
• Kramer’s favorite punishment for witchcraft is called the “strappado,” which is a device that attaches to the wrists and pulls upward, hanging its victims by their arms until they dislocate.
• In Kramer’s first successful trial, he implements this type of torture until two women confess to committing acts of demonic sorcery; for this, they were burned alive.

THE HAMMER’S STRATEGY

• The text’s two objectives are to warn the general public against the danger of witches and to give Kramer official authority to hunt them.
• The Hammer of the Witches put fear into the general public by warning them that witches were accomplices of the devil.
• The text also convinced its readers that witches were a sign of the apocalypse.
• The book attempted to persuade its audience that female sexual seduction is another sign of witchcraft.
• Often women were blamed for conjuring a hailstorm with the intention of destroying the area’s crops.
• According to the Hammer, the weak are the most dangerous; it condemned women who were poverty-stricken, mentally ill, and even those who simply practiced herbal medicine.

VIDEO | PHOTOS | FACTS

[From an article by Cody Liska, featured in Insight Magazine, that mentions the Malleus Maleficarum]

In a dimly lit cave, a sorority of witches stands around a bubbling cauldron, cackling as they await the witching hour. Their faces are lousy with sores and their breath putrid with death. Behind their abysmally black eyes, the devil can be seen looking back… plotting. The night yields a full moon, magic is aplenty. They’ll need all the help they can get. After all, an unbaptized infant is a delicacy. The midnight bell tolls – time to act. And in devilish accordance, they snatch their broomsticks and vanish into the night.

Although a Medieval foreboding of a witch is a far cry from today’s understanding of one, it’s difficult to skirt the misconception. It has a permanent locale in our collective unconscious. Needless to say, a real witch lacks these stereotypical prerequisites.

Sixty-three-year-old Ellyn Darrah is a witch. In fact, she’s a High Priestess. She writes and orchestrates rituals, dances around campfires and drinks mead. She is not possessed, nor does she eat babies. She’s more like a hip grandmother than a spooky spell-caster. The depth of her quirkiness is immediately obvious as she orders a vegetarian pizza with pepperoni.

Twenty years ago, Darrah began her journey as a witch. It all started in her college years back at the University of Santa Barbara, California, when a poster read “Come Celebrate Mother Goddess” caught her attention.

• Read Full Article >>

I came across an interesting article on a Blog post, which cites the Malleus Maleficarum and author Carl Sagan, among other sources, to examine some of the issues behind the Malleus and the Inquisition. It makes for an interesting read. Excerpts;

With no separation of Church or State (they were essentially one and the same) the Catholic Church set into motion it’s own version of the “Final Solution” in an effort to rid society of witches, for according to Pope Innocent, “If ‘the abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished,’ the souls of multitudes face eternal damnation.” Clearly then, for the sake of “family values”, witches needed to be sought out and brought to justice. Carl Sagan summarizes the situation quite well in Chapter 7 of his book, “The Demon-Haunted World”:

What the Malleus comes down to, pretty much, is that if you’re accused of witchcraft, you’re a witch. Torture is an unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation. There are no rights of the defendant. There is no opportunity to confront the accusers. Little attention is given to the possibility that accusations might be made for impious purposes – jealousy, say, or revenge, or the greed of the inquisitors who routinely confiscated for their own private benefit the property of the accused. This technical manual for torturers also includes methods of punishment tailored to release demons from the victim’s body before the process kills her. The Malleus in hand, the Pope’s encouragement guaranteed, Inquisitors began springing up all over Europe.”

Read The Full Article >>

I came across a bizarre performance by the Mount Pleasant High School Marching Band in Mount Pleasant, North Carolina, titled “Malleus Maleficarum: The Witches’ Hammer”. It’s benign enough, except for the one part where a “witch” gets caught within a tightening circle, and then the band forms into something resembling a hammer. I’m sure nothing terribly controversial was intended, but parts of the performance disturbed me. I couldn’t tell you why.

- Wicasta

We’re aware of the injection of malicious code into our pages, and hope our users realize that we’re actively fighting it. At the moment, this is almost a daily routine with us. This web site, as well as my personal web site, are the targets of repeated attacks, apparently exploiting a hole in the security of our web server. This is an issue we would like to have corrected immediately, but we’re engaged in a heated blame game with our host provider, who insists that it is our security procedures, and not theirs, that is at fault (this in spite of almost daily password changes on our script installations, FTP accounts, and Master accounts). In short, we can’t get our host provider to address the issue because they refuse to accept our contention that their server security protocols are faulty.

We’re looking to relocate the Malleus Maleficarum to a new server soon, as soon as funds allow. In the meantime, please accept my assurances that I am hyper-vigilant in checking our scripts on a daily basis for changes that need to be corrected. And if anyone knows how we might more effectively fight the annoying IFRAME injections which hackers seem to be able to do to this web site with impunity, we would certainly appreciate any recommendations. But please keep in mind that all of the obvious issues (frequent password changes, virus scans and other security protocols) have already been addressed. So… recommending that we change our passwords will warrant a hearty “duh!” from us. Or from me, at least.

My apologies for the inconvenience. Apparently someone thinks this work is important enough to be disrupted. I suppose we should be flattered that some loser has made it his personal mission to disrupt this web site. But I’m not. I believe in the Three Fold Law, but take little comfort in knowing that some misfit is earning a whole lot of pain.

- Wicasta Lovelace

We’ve recently stumbled onto another way of perceiving the influence of the Malleus Maleficarum, by observing its position using Google’s Timeline. I highly recommend taking a look at the work through the prism of this Google tool. If nothing else, it shows us how many of the documents on the Internet that are related to the Malleus are spread across the centuries. If you’re a geek like me, this helps put some of what’s been written about the Malleus into a historical perspective.

You may have noticed that the Malleus Maleficarum is back online. We’ve tentatively put our files back on the server, gambling that the issues that faced us in the last few months with the root access server hacks have finally been corrected by our host provider. The server has been hack free for several weeks now, following some over-due security hardening by our host provider, so we thought we would get our toes and wet and see how things went.

I want to personally apologize for the Malleus Maleficarum being offline for so long. We had expected to simply move to a new server, but with money being short and the economy being what it is, that just wasn’t in the cards. That’s the one thing we learned rather quickly. While thousands of people are quick to avail themselves of free resources, no one is willing to help support the effort. And why should they, really? Our PDF files have been widely distributed across the Internet, and many webmasters have no moral problem with illegally mirroring our web site and claiming the work as their own. My point is that while perhaps this web site has more functionality that most of the other available (legal or otherwise) resources, the material is out there if you know where to look. In the interim, when money was short and there was no material support from users to speak of, we simply did what we could when we could.

I assure you that we haven’t forgotten that our host provider maintained laughable security protocols and dismissed our complaints as the whining of clueless administrators who didn’t have the sense to change their own passwords. We don’t have much confidence in their assurances that security protocols have (finally) been addressed and the server has been hardened. Therefore, we are still setting up a new server and moving ahead with our plans to find a more permanent home for the Malleus Maleficarum online project.

Now if we can just figure out all this Linux stuff.

- Wicasta Lovelace

[This article from the Sierra Times Herald in Arizona by police Lt. Jim Adams. It's a timely article, and references the Malleus, so I thought I'd mention it here.]

Behind the Badge: Treat kids to a safe Halloween

Americans spend $6.9 billion annually on Halloween, which is second only to Christmas. I love Halloween, but the concept puzzles me from a parenting standpoint. Consider that we will collectively buy costumes to conceal our children’s identities and then let them go out after dark to run the streets and ask strangers for candy (of all things)! Equally interesting is that many of the costumes we buy are personifications of people we consider villains, such as pirates and witches.

Witches (and the hunting of them) have an interesting history. In 1486, a pair of Dominican monks authored the Malleus Maleficarum, which set guidelines by which a witch could potentially be identified from amongst the general populace. Standards included women who keep pets (construed as companions granted by satan), were old (their longevity being a gift from the devil), had strange markings on their body, failed to bleed properly when their skin was punctured, or missed church without good cause.

This literary work was likely inspired by the papal bull of 1484 issued by Pope Innocent VIII titled the Summis Desiderantes. It stated that “all heretical depravity should be driven far from the frontiers and bournes of the Faithful.” This amounted to his blessing relative to the practice of rooting out suspected witches as part of the Inquisition.

All of this was further complicated by the invention of the Gutenberg press in 1439, which made it possible for the Malleus Maleficarum to be published 13 times between 1487 and 1520, leading to the book’s message spread across Europe.

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Our PDF files containing the full text of the Malleus Maleficarum, including my introduction, was posted on the Free Information Society web site without any proper credit. This implies that the files contained on that web site are the original work of the Free Information Society, and not a product of years of pain-staking transcription by Christie Rice and myself.

Noted at the bottom of the introduction page was the following;

“All Rights Reserved by Jonathan Dunder. Do not reproduce without permission.”

• Malleus Maleficarum @ Free Information Society