The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft. William Godwin

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The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft - William Godwin


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of executions there in the course of the century preceding 1628 would be 15,700. We know that from 1610 to 1660 was the great epoch of the witch trials, and that so late as 1749 Maria Renata was executed at Wurtzburg for witchcraft; and though in the interval between 1660 and that date it is to be hoped that the number of these horrors had diminished, there can be little doubt that several thousands must be added to the amount already stated. If Bamberg, Paderborn, Treves, and the other Catholic bishoprics, whose zeal was not less ardent, furnished an equal contingent, and if the Protestants, as we know14, actually vied with them in the extent to which these cruelties were carried, the number of victims from the date of Innocent’s bull to the final extinction of these persecutions must considerably exceed 100,000 in Germany.

      It was one fatal effect of the perseverance with which Satan and his dealings were thus brought before the view of every one, that thousands of weak and depraved minds were actually led into the belief that they had formed a connection with the evil being, and that the visions which had so long haunted the brain of Sprenger and his associates had been realized in their own case. In this way alone can we in some measure account for the strange confessions which form the great peculiarity in the witch trials, where unhappy creatures, with the full knowledge of their fate, admit their intercourse with Satan, their midnight meetings, incantations, their dealings with spirits, “white, black, and grey, with all their trumpery,” the grotesque horrors of the sabbath,—in short, every wild and impossible phantasm which had received colour and a body in the ‘Malleus,’—and seemed to be perfectly satisfied that they had fully merited the fiery trial to which their confession immediately subjected them. When we read these trials, we think of the effect of the Jew’s fiddle in Grimm’s fairy tale; we see the delusion spreading like an epidemic from one to another, till first the witnesses, then the judges, and lastly the poor criminals themselves, all yield to the giddy whirl, and go off like dancing Dervises under its influence.


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