The surge in sorcery and witchcraft related murders in Papua New Guinea has drawn condemnation widely from international groups such as the United Nations and Amnesty International. A growing culture of insecurity and fear has been blamed for the unrest, and there are concerns it will impact on the country’s economic development in the long term. And why not? Who wants to do business in a country where people are being slaughtered as witches?

Women’s rights groups are also up in arms at the disproportionate number of women being targeted. Women in Papua New Guinea are six times more likely than men to be subjected to sorcery-related violence. Pressure is now being brought to bear upon the PNG government to take action against those who are justifying the killing of innocent people through sorcery accusations. Moves to repeal PNG’s absurd Sorcery Act, enacted in 1971 while PNG was still a colony, have been made. This comes after a number of women accused of sorcery and witchcraft were murdered in recent months.

In February, the world was shocked when graphic photographs circulated on the internet of a 20-year old mother, Kepari Leniata, being burnt alive in Mt Hagen in Papua New Guinea’s northern highlands.

Links

• Read More @ Islands Business

The post World Condemns Murders As Papua New Guinea Seeks Answers appeared first on The Malleus Maleficarum.

Simply put, there are things we want to talk about. They don’t always lend themselves to a full-blown blog post on the web site. So if you Follow us on Twitter, we’ll try to keep you apprised of witchcraft related news stories, as well as our occasional discoveries of the Malleus Maleficarum in popular culture and rare editions of the work for sale on eBay and other sources.

The one thing we can promise you is that you won’t find a bunch of fluff on our Twitter feed. There’s enough of that going around already. We’ll stick to the facts, and the point of this web site, and leave the cute bunnies and cat photos for someone else.

Anyway, we look forward to seeing ya. As ever, thanks for your support and consideration.

The post Malleus Maleficarum Joins Twitter appeared first on The Malleus Maleficarum.

We’re proud of the new design. It’s painfully straightforward and simple. But that’s what we like about it. Some of our past designs were a little cluttered and perhaps got in the way of what people come to this web site to find – The Malleus Maleficarum.

Our goal, as ever, is to keep the Malleus alive in popular consciousness so that these horrors might never be practiced upon mankind again. It truly is the doom of men that they forget.

Hopefully along the way we’ve made the web site easier to use. Please let us know what we can do to improve your experience here. We would love to hear from you!

~ Wicasta

The post Welcome To The Machine appeared first on The Malleus Maleficarum.

You’d be surprised how many people assume it was. As such, I’ve added the following text to our “About Us” page, just to clear up a few things and, hopefully, avoid any unnecessary drama in the future.

Please Note: This web site is not affiliated with the Catholic Church in any way, shape or form. In fact, both Wicasta and Christie are Pagan. This web site is made available as a reference for a historical artifact, nothing more. We are certainly not responsible in any way, shape or form for the Malleus Maleficarum itself or any of the harm that came from it. In the end, if anyone wants to lodge a formal complaint about the Malleus Maleficarum or the Catholic Church in general, the appropriate place to do so would be the official Vatican web site – http://www.vatican.va/ – which could properly be considered the official web site of all Catholics. Recriminations about The Burning Times or the Malleus Maleficarum are misplaced here. You’re preaching to the choir.

As ever, I look forward to your feedback. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them here or to write us directly. Or, if you’re really pissed, maybe you should write The Pope.

Love ya! Never change.

~ Wicasta Lovelace

The post Misplaced Anger appeared first on The Malleus Maleficarum.

History professor Andrew Gow, who is now working on translating the work from medieval French to English, describes its content as “atrocious”.

“If I were to describe this book, I’d say, well, think of all of the most evil books in Harry Potter and the Malfoy’s library, well those were imaginary evil. This is real evil, right here,” he says.

The Waldensians were medieval heretics who disavowed the power of the priests and allowed women to preach. But for the author of this book, Dominican inquisitor Johannes Tinctor, “Waldensian” was a synonym for “witch”.

Due to the timing of the book’s creation around 1460, ahead of mass state-sponsored witch hunting in Europe, Gow also considers the text to be a priceless cultural artifact that holds great insight into the history of Europe, and perhaps explains much of what came later.

“It wasn’t until books like this appeared and spread the idea that witchcraft is actually a form of Satan worship, a form of service to the devil, that witchcraft becomes a capital crime,” he explains.

Twenty-six years before the publication of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, Tinctor (also known as Jean Taincture) had pulled together various folk beliefs and ancient myths to concoct his own paranoid propaganda fantasy, a work that would fuel homicidal witch hunts for centuries, and bring to the world much of the Halloween imagery that still haunts our collective imaginations.

“It’s called the elaborated theory of witchcraft and this is its beginning,” explains Gow’s former PhD student, Rob Desjardins. ”This is where a stew of ideas finally congealed into a coherent picture. This is where we get the first thorough statement of what witches do and why ‘we’ should persecute them.”

In addition to changing the way witchcraft was looked at in medieval Europe, the work may also be responsible for a common image we associate with witches: the riding of brooms.

“This is one of the first three known depictions of women riding on brooms,” Gow says. It’s also one of the first detailed descriptions of witches having sex with the devil. ”It’s a mix of misogyny and prurient sexual imagination, and of course, sexual transgression is one of the things that frightened male clerics most.”

Before the mid-1400s, the medieval Church had, for the most part, been tolerant of “wise women” who offered folk cures or practiced pagan rituals that were mostly half-forgotten by the general populace. But in 1459 a witch hunt swept the city of Arras, where Tinctor was a canon at the cathedral in nearby Tournai (in today’s Belgium). Tinctor seized upon the chance to make his name and denounce witchcraft as Satanic heresy:

“It is certain that this crime is entirely new nor was its like ever heard of, and I dare well say that this sin of witchcraft is worse and more execrable than all the detestable errors of the pagans,” Tinctor wrote.

Witches, Tinctor insisted, summon storms, destroy crops and are “so caked in the mud of vile thoughts” that they “do not even shrink from having carnal intercourse with the devil transformed into the guise of an animal.”

Tinctor’s original 1460 text was published in Latin. The edition at the University of Alberta is a 1465 translation in medieval French, beautifully illuminated with gold leaf. It’s one of only four known copies in the whole world. The others are in the national libraries of France and Belgium, and Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Gow believes the University of Albera’s version is the oldest of the four. Yet until a few years ago, it was effectively considered to have been lost.

John Lunn donated it to the U of A in 1988. Lunn, who emigrated to Canada from England in 1957, was Alberta’s assistant deputy minister of historical resources in the late 1970′s, and later served as executive director of Alberta’s museums.

Gow and his grad student, Francois Pageau, hope to release the manual to the public once they finish translating it.

The post Rare Manuscript Unveiled at University of Alberta appeared first on The Malleus Maleficarum.

Between 1642 and 1693, at least 40 people in the colony of Connecticut were tried as witches. The historical record indicates that at least 10 of them were hanged. In 1647 the state hung a Windsor woman named Alse Young, who was the first accused witch executed in New England. Most of those who were tried as witches, like Alse, were women. But who were they? How did these people come to be accused of practicing witchcraft? What were their lives like? Did they actually practice witchcraft, or were they simply the victims of other, unrelated factors, as were so many other accused witches, for which the accusation of witchcraft proved an easy way to exact revenge? How and why did the accusing of witches finally end? Or has it?

Witchcraft was punishable by death in the Connecticut Colony, but its 1642 witch hysteria occurred a full half a century before the notorious 1692 witch hunts in Salem, Massachusetts. Salem is more infamous for its witches, but all throughout Connecticut magistrates and Puritan ministers prosecuted alleged witches. Connecticut’s witch hunt was the fiercest in New England.

Many records are lost or non-existent, so piecing together details is a difficult task, but there is a way that we can learn more about the subject and begin to understand what life was like back then, and why witchcraft was such an obsessed upon subject of time.

To help bring the voices of the victims of those New England witch hunts to life, actress Virginia Wolf of Herstory Theater wrote “Panic in Connecticut: Accused Witches Have Their Say”, a one-woman show that sheds light on the Puritan society that condemned alleged witches to death in the decades before the hysteria in Salem. Ms. Wolf, dressed in period costume, takes audiences back to the 17th century and brings to life five women accused of witchcraft in Connecticut — Mary Staples, Lydia Gilbert, Judith Varlet, Mary Barnes and Mercy Disborough — who share their painful and horrifying stories.

“As a woman, I always wondered what it must have been like for these women,” Ms. Wolf explained, noting that men were also accused. “I tie their stories together so people [in the audience] can understand how the panic spread.”

Mary Staples of Fairfield was accused twice of witchcraft — first in 1654 and again in 1692. She was acquitted both times. Ms. Wolf depicts Mary as a woman in her 70s, and recalls the harsh reality of Puritan New England and the dominance of religion in everyday life. She explains society’s distrust of strangers and anything out of the ordinary, of Puritan settlers’ need to explain God’s will and how it was at work – especially when the inexplicable occurred.

“You can’t judge that time period by today’s standards,” Ms. Wolf said, noting that science was not even a glimmer on the horizon. “The only reason for something bad happening was witchcraft. They truly believed the devil was at work when milk curdled or cheese molded. When Hartford experienced bad blights or plagues, when people grew increasingly frightened and scared, it led to accusations. Sometimes it was out of greediness or envy, but usually it was caused by fear. They felt they needed to cleanse the world of evil for better or worse. That is how many people’s fates unfolded.”

Working forward chronologically, Ms. Wolf moves on to Lydia Gilbert of Windsor, who was accused of witchcraft, and was convicted and hanged in 1654. She, Ms. Wolf said, was unfortunately at the wrong place at the wrong time. Her mere presence during a series of misfortunes sealed her fate.

“The [Connecticut] trial proceedings aren’t well documented,” Wolf says. “I grew up in Salem Mass. I was in ‘The Crucible’ and we all know the history of those trials and the people affected by them, but the records for the Connecticut trials are scattered. It was difficult to research, but I hope people will walk away with a better understanding of the trials and what these women went through.”

Then there is Judith Varlet of Farmington, who was accused and acquitted between 1662 and ’63, and whose only real crime was that she was of Dutch descent, a woman of great intellect who spoke her mind, and who had amassed personal wealth. She was also the sister-in-law of New Netherlands’ governor, Peter Stuyvesant. Judith was eventually allowed to leave the colony for New Amsterdam, but only after a forceful protest by Stuyvesant against what he considered the Connecticut court’s fictitious accusations of witchery.

“It was certainly an interesting period in American history,” Ms. Wolf said. “Cheese can go moldy, milk will curdle, cattle get sick, but to these people, it was the work of the devil. They didn’t understand science as we do today. Some people never knew this happened in Connecticut and, sometimes, I’m lucky enough to have a descendant in the audience. People still find the panics in [New England] fascinating.”

Also represented is Mary Barnes of Farmington, accused in 1662, who was tried and hung in 1663. She was the last person to die in the Hartford witch hunt. Mary, Ms. Wolf said, lacked self-confidence, seemed quite helpless, and did not defend herself against her accusers. Rather, she acquiesced – after all, if so many people believed she were a witch, it must have been true.

“This is a busy time of year for me,” Ms. Wolf said, noting that the show focuses not only on a frightening time in Colonial history, but on the people it affected. “… What I’ve discovered is that most people don’t know this happened in Connecticut.”

The courtrooms were then quieted for over a quarter century with the return of Connecticut’s governor, John Winthrop Jr., who had been in England securing the royal charter from Charles II. During his absence, the witch hunt hysteria had reached its peak. Winthrop, according to state historian Walter Woodward, “forcefully intervened to end Connecticut’s rush to judgment on witch suspects, saving them from a sure trip to the gallows.” In fact, he said Winthrop drew on his own fascination with alchemy and magic to save, rather than condemn, the accused.

Connecticut, the fiercest witch hunter of all the colonies, then seemed to be the most tolerant until 1693, when the sharp-tongued Mercy Disbrough of Fairfield was accused and found guilty of witchcraft. But she never saw the gallows. Rather, she was acquitted. According to state documents, however, she was subjected to the water test – suspected witches were sometimes dropped into a body of water to determine if they possessed evil spirits. Theory dictated that if the person sank, he or she was innocent; if they floated, he or she was guilty because the pure water cast out the evil spirit.

“I hope I can offer a true picture of what it must have been like for these people,” says Ms. Wolf.

“Panic in Connecticut” can be appreciated on several levels. It is a superb theatrical performance by Virginia Wolf. And it is a cautionary tale – still valid today – about the importance of tolerance and the danger of gossip.

For more information or to schedule, contact;

Virginia Wolf
860-550-0936
info@herstorytheater.com

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Herstory-Theater/105412942894748

2012 Schedule

Friday, October 19
7:30 PM
Killingworth Fire Station
Killingworth, CT
for the Killingworth Historical Society

Wednesday, October 24
1:00 PM
“Panic in Connecticut”
The Arbors at Hopbrook
403 W. Center Street
Manchester, CT
Not open to the public

Thursday, October 25
7:00 PM
“Panic in Connecticut”
South Windsor Historical Society
Wood Memorial Library
73 Main Street
South Windsor, CT

Friday, October 26
6:00 PM
“In a Preternatural Way; The Witchcraft Trial of Mary Barnes”
Old State House, Hartford

Sunday, October 28
TBA
Rowayton Historical Society

Monday, October 29
3:00 PM
“Panic in Connecticut”
Stone Ridge Retirement Community
186 Jerry Brown Road
Mystic, CT

Monday, October 29
7:15 PM
“Panic in Connecticut”
Ashlar Village
Cheshire Road
Wallingford, CT

Tuesday, October 30
2:00 PM
“Panic in Connecticut”
The Lodge at Cold Spring
50 Cold Spring Road, Rocky Hill, CT
Open to the public

Wednesday, October 31
2:30 PM
Kennelly School, Hartford
(not open to the public)
Friday, November 16 3pm
“Panic in Connecticut”
Pomperaug Woods
80 Heritage Road
Southbury, CT

The post Panic in Connecticut: Accused Witches Have Their Say appeared first on The Malleus Maleficarum.

The first thing I needed to do was to add the Malleus web site to Bing’s webmaster tools. Honestly, the last time I looked over Bing, they didn’t have webmaster tools. So after the pleasant surprise of finding them, I set out to see what this might mean to us and our campaign to recover some of our dwindling traffic (or at least figure out where it’s going).

Much to my surprise, our traffic doubled overnight, and tripled by the third night. Apparently there are a lot more people using Bing than is generally admitted. At least by Google.

So. Where does that put us? Well, nowhere, really. This isn’t a grand announcement. We’ve just sort of discovered a whole new audience for the Malleus Maleficarum web site. Or at least a new way to make our searches available. We’ll see how this Bing thing turns out. But for the moment, it looks promising. And it’s oh, so satisfying to be able to thumb our nose at Google a bit.

The post The Courting of Bing appeared first on The Malleus Maleficarum.

These kinds of things are annoying. Firstly, Google has a virtual monopoly on the web search business. Sure, there are other alternatives. Some folk swear by Bing. Yahoo! is still out there. But for the moment, the only real game in town is Google. So if your web traffic suddenly dies, you can pretty much bet you’ve done something to annoy Google.

The thing is… Google won’t really tell you what that is.

There are a number of ways you can get into trouble with Google. The easiest way is to post too much duplicate content from other web sites. We don’t really do that here, but we do occasionally post excerpts from news stories about witch hunts or witchcraft with links to the original pages. Given that we don’t post a lot of original articles (we’re an archive site for a historical text, not a social networking site), it could perhaps appear to Google’s meat-headed bots and algorithms that we’re some kind of spam site.

Of course, we’ll never really know. Google’s not talking. Our statistics at Google Webmaster show clean. And when you search for the Malleus Maleficarum, we are still the second link like we have always been. But when Google throttles your web site, it’s the subsequent searches that don’t show up.

For example, one popular search is for the phrase “hardly clear of the ground”, which people remember because it refers to a suspected witch being suspended in mid-air by her thumbs. It is directly from the Malleus Maleficarum. And yet if you search for that phrase on Google, our web site doesn’t show up until the end of the second page of results. Even when you search for that phrase accompanied by the word “Malleus”, we are still far down the bottom of the second page.

So, you may ask?

What that means is that we’re being throttled by Google for some reason known only to them. The organic searches which should be bringing up many results from text queries and other Malleus related searches are simply not returning results. We’re not being seen. Who really makes it as far as the bottom of the second page of search results?

In the end, there’s not a whole hell of a lot we can do about it. We’ll do what we’ve always done and keep our web site free of malware, and hope that one day Google will let us back in the game. We’ve also start playing footsies more directly with Bing. So we’ll see. In the meantime, if you’ve had trouble finding parts of the web site through Google searches, now you know why.

The post Sparring With Google appeared first on The Malleus Maleficarum.

We’ve had some frustration of late with finding a mobile solution to accommodate those good folks who use the Malleus Maleficarum web site on mobile devices. The basic problem has been finding a decent theme that does everything we want it to do. So far the options have been between simple, utilitarian themes that function like they’re supposed to but generally have no “pizzazz”, or gorgeous, fun mobile themes that just don’t work like they’re supposed to. A good example is a premium theme we just purchased, which looked great, had exceptional functionality, and which thrilled us during testing. However, that theme stopped working when WooCommerce updated their scripts. So… it worked for about three days.

For now, we’ve decided to stick with one of the themes that came with our theme switcher. It’s the one that’s in place now. And while we always regarded it as a temporary measure, the damned thing works. What we’ll probably be doing is modifying the headers and menus of that theme to have better functionality than what it did out of the box, and generally make do with what we’ve got. Any suggestions or tips will be welcomed.

Please accept our apologies if you’ve experienced any frustration over the mobile experience here at the Malleus Maleficarum Online project. Rest assured that our intention all along has only been to provide our users with the best online experience possible on our web site. Sometimes that hasn’t worked out so well. But, as always, we’re working to improve.

Thanks for your patience.

~ Wicasta Lovelace

The post Exploring Mobile Options appeared first on The Malleus Maleficarum.

If you are offended by this design, please accept my apologies. But I would invite you to look into the history behind the statement, and perhaps ponder the truly engaging question that has, thus far, not been asked. In a contemporary society, does this design belong as a valid part of the discourse? And if so, what does that say about the ongoing relevance of the Malleus Maleficarum?

With all that said, I encourage you to go buy the t-shirt and help us keep the lights on. Make your voices heard, whatever you may believe. That’s the only real way to participate in American democracy.

~ Wicasta

Keep Your Mitts Off Women’s Rights – T-Shirt
$18.99 – sizes Small to 5X
@ Floozees Doozees

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