[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.

Read The Full Article >>>

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

A recent article by Carol Gibson on Examiner.com, titled “When did women become subjects of a lesser god, and what about now?”, mentions the Malleus Maleficarum in relation to comments about Women’s Equality Day (Aug 26) which commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Woman Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave U.S. women full voting rights in 1920. The unfortunate part of this  article is that Carol Gibson sets forth a fallacy that has been popularized by the Catholic Church; that being that the Malleus Maleficarum was a banned book and had relatively no influence whatsoever (which historical records show simply isn’t true).

The pertinent quotes to take from the article, for those of us who are interested in the Malleus as a historical artifact, are;

A text called Malleus Maleficarum, an ancient text translated as “Witchs’ Hammer” contained reports of the Inquisition describing possibly the bloodiest account of this time period, and possibly of all time in written history.

The Inquisition propaganda of the time sought to indoctrinate people against women. The “evil” of freethinking women was decried along with instructions to the priests. This included where to find them, and how to torture and destroy them.

The Inquisition propaganda of the time sought to indoctrinate people against women. The “evil” of freethinking women was decried along with instructions to the priests. This included where to find them, and how to torture and destroy them.

As it turned out later, the Catholic Church banned these writings as not being in accordance with the scriptures. More than this, these writings were mostly ignored other than the perversions of the man who wrote them in 1490.

I felt compelled to post a response, which I’ve included below so that it can be commented upon;

Just a note about the Malleus. The Malleus Maleficarum was first published in 1487, but it was not placed on the Catholic Church’s “Index Librorum Prohibitorum” (”List of Prohibited Books”) until 1559 (by which time the cat was already out of the bag, as it were). One of the authors, Henrich Kramer, was denounced in 1490, but this had no bearing on the Malleus Maleficarum itself. The Malleus was widely used as a reference in secular courts, and at it’s zenith of influence was one of the most widely published books (second only to The Bible). The claim that the Malleus Maleficarum was an unimportant work that went largely ignored is a dubious claim that’s been floated by the Catholic Church for centuries. The historical record clearly shows that the Malleus Maleficarum, in spite of being placed on the “Index Librorum Prohibitorum” 70 years after its publication, was wildly popular, and remained so throughout the Inquisition as a reference guide for secular courts.

Any thoughts upon this issue? I look forward to hearing what you think about this article, as well as the notion that the Malleus Maleficarum was never an influential work (which, if that’s true, leads one to wonder why we’re still talking about it).

- Wicasta Lovelace

Links

• Full Article @ Examiner.com
• Women’s Equality Day
  

There is an interesting article by Sandra Miesel on the blog EndrTimes which discusses the Inquisition, the “Burning Times” and the often exaggerated numbers of victims who perished during the “witch craze”.  It provides a lot of historical context to the Inquisition and the Malleus’ roll in prosecuting those of accused of witchcraft. I highly recommend giving it a read.

What follows are excerpts from the text of that article;

Meanwhile, witch-hunters’ manuals multiplied, most notably the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), published in 1486. Its authors, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, were experienced Dominican inquisitors who had burned 48 witches in one diocese alone and had obtained a papal bull approving their mission. Reversing the old principle of the Canon Episcopi, Sprenger and Kraemer proclaimed that not believing in the reality of witches was heresy. Witches regularly did physical as well as spiritual harm to others, they wrote, and allegiance to the devil defined witchcraft. Sprenger and Kraemer exhorted secular authorities to fight witches by any means necessary.

Malleus Maleficarum (notice the feminine possessive of “witches”) was a vicious misogynist tract. It depicted women as the sexual playmates of Satan, declaring: “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” Ironically, Sprenger also had a deep devotion to Mary. He helped to shape the modern rosary and founded the first rosary confraternity.

Malleus Maleficarum did not cover its ground completely, failing to discuss the actual pact that witches made with the devil, the sabbat, familiars (imps in animal form who aided witches), and night-flying. But those elements did not always appear in witchcraft cases. By itself, the Malleus started no new witch-panics, but it was freely used by later witchcraft writers, Protestant and Catholic alike. The Spanish inquisitors were nearly alone in scoffing at its lack of sophistication.

The demonologists who absorbed the Malleus were highly cultured men, such as the Protestant Jean Bodin, “the Aristotle of the 16th century,” and his contemporary, the Jesuit classicist Martin del Rio. Those theoreticians pounded home the principle of the crimen exceptum: Because witchcraft was so vile an offense, accused witches had no legal rights. “Not one witch in a million would be accused or punished,” Bodin boasted, “if the procedure were governed by ordinary rules.” Anyone who defended accused witches or denied their crimes deserved the same punishment as witches, Bodin wrote.

Read The Full Article @ EndrTimes >>

Around here we like indulging in theoretical exercises. Perhaps that’s an occupational hazard when you host a web site for an Inquisitor’s handbook. But in keeping with that tradition, we’ve recently created a Malleus Maleficarum group on Facebook. Since our forum scripts were such a disaster (overrun almost immediately by spammers), we thought perhaps discussion of the Malleus and its impact on contemporary society could be moved to Facebook, where there is a robust architecture supporting just such a dialogue.

If you have a Facebook account and would like to join us and the discussion on Facebook, please come by and say hello. Our group there can be found at;

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=149439229324

You may have noticed while doing Google searches pertaining to the Malleus that Google has flagged our domain with the warning; “This site may harm your computer.” Well, that’s just not true, so you can stop worrying about it.

What happened was that someone found an exploit in a WordPress theme that we were using and was forcing an iFrame HTML snippet into our theme, which led to a known virus spreading web site. We immediately pounced upon the offending code when it came to our attention, and found it necessary to change our theme (which is why the web site has enjoyed a recent upgrade). Since we’ve changed themes, we’ve had no further problems with the malicious code.

Google, thus far, has been unimpressed. We’ve petitioned to have the warning removed from our listing, but have only been told be Google that they will “review the issue”, promising only that “it may take up to two weeks or more to process your request”. In the meantime, we’re flagged as having malicious code that we do not have, and this leading up into the new semester.

Rest assured that the malicious code which led Google to flag our domains has long since been removed. As well, we are checking our theme installation daily for suspicious changes. We are doing all we can to ensure that your visit to this web site is pleasurable, easy to navigate, and virus free. Hopefully Google will soon stop alarming our visitors and let us all be on our way.

Walk in light and peace.

- Wicasta Lovelace

We’ve tracked down and removed the malicious code that some loser managed to slip into our main WordPress files. The loser in question found a way to insert an iframe tag that linked to something that was posted at web-analizer.net. If you got a virus from our web site, it was through this malicious code. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience.

We are currently working with Google to ensure that our entire web site is free of this code, and hope to have the warning flags dropped from our web site soon. Rest assured that we have located the cause of the problem, and are taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

- Wicasta Lovelace

Interview by Joanna Weiss
Boston Globe
August 2, 2009

Harry Potter should be glad he practices his wizarding in the modern world. European sorcerers had a much less pleasant time of things in 1486, when the Malleus Maleficarum – “The Hammer of Witches” – was first published.

The lengthy tome was medieval Europe’s definitive guide to recognizing and prosecuting witchcraft, the justification for a wave of burnings-at-the-stake – largely of peasant women – that took place from the late 1400s to about 1520. And it helped spread the paranoid notion of a vast satanic conspiracy: a world where demons roamed freely, enticing women to cast spells, kill babies, interfere with procreation, and try to delay the fast-approaching End Times. (At the time, many thought the Earth’s sell-by date was 1535.)

Mackay: It depends on what you mean by hue and cry. People believed in witchcraft, but they didn’t know about satanism. Whether you think you’re just some kind of wise woman and you’re able to say a few spells on some herbs is one thing. Thinking that that person is involved in a conspiracy with Satan is another thing. In terms of the big witch-hunting trials, they were inquisitions that were conducted by the authorities rather than things that happened out of the population. You wouldn’t have crowds of people like in “Frankenstein” with pitchforks and whatnot demanding that so-and-so were killed.

Ideas: Institoris takes a pretty dim view of women’s role in all of this.

Mackay: Oh, he’s got a terrible attitude towards women. He thinks they’re less mentally capable and they’re more emotional and they’re therefore more susceptible to influence by Satan. One of his big notions of how women get involved in this is by being sluts, being dumped, and being recruited not by Satan directly but usually by an old woman. He says it’s old women who recruit young women. The way he presents it on the surface sounds a little bit sympathetic.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.

References

• Original Article
• Christopher S. Mackay

By Odhiambo Joseph
BBC News, Kenya

Villagers, many straight from their farms, and armed with machetes, sticks and axes, are shouting and crowding round in a big group in Kenya’s fertile Kisii district. I can’t see clearly what is going on, but heavy smoke is rising from the ground and a horrible stench fills the air. More people are streaming up the hill, some of them with firewood and maize stalks.

Suddenly an old woman breaks from the crowd, screaming for mercy. Three or four people go after her, beat her and drag her back, pushing her onto – what I can now see – is a raging fire.

Burned alive

I was witnessing a horrific practice which appears to be on the increase in Kenya – the lynching of people accused of being witches. I personally saw the burning alive of five elderly men and women in Itii village.

• Read More at BBC

An article by Mary Zeiss Stange in today’s On Religion column in USA Today makes reference to the Malleus Maleficarum in its examination of Bush Administration torture policies. It makes for an interesting read. I’ve included a few paragraphs below, and a link to the article.

“Viewed objectively, the original witch hunts shed significant light on the current debate about the uses of torture. Conducted under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, the Inquisition, and more particularly that aspect of it known as the Witchcraze, was the most spectacular case of systematic torture in Western religious history. It lasted roughly from the 15th through the 17th centuries in Europe, and it offers definitive proof that if reliable information is what you are after, torture is not a good way to get it.”

“The inquisitors had at their disposal a handbook: the Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer against Witches’), which was published in the 1480s by two Dominican priests. The logic employed in this document — covering areas such as the relative merits of red hot irons as opposed to boiling water, and how to strike the right balance of food and/or sleep deprivation — is strikingly similar to that revealed in the Bush administration’s ‘torture memos’ released in April by President Obama’s Justice Department.”

“If invoking religious precedent seems an odd way to resolve the question of whether torture is ever acceptable, it is sobering to note that according to a recently released poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a majority of regularly attending American churchgoers say it is. Questioned by the Associated Press as to whether Jesus would condone torture, conservative commentator Gary Bauer has speculated that Jesus himself, being the Son of God, probably wouldn’t be a torturer, but that he’d regard as ‘morally suspect’ any of his followers who shrank from torturing for the sake of the greater good.”

• Witch Hunts And Torture – USA Today (full article)