Wow that was SO well explained - thank you!
tasty lettuce
I just listened to a Yale lecture on youtube - about witchcraft. It's attached if anyone's interested.
All this screeching about how unfair it was…well actually it wasn't. They were charged with crimes, because they used witchcraft to harm people.
It was mostly women, because women didn't have the physical ability to go and fight their enemies, they had to use other means.
Yes, there were false accusations, the tribe can be cruel if you don't toe the party line.
There was a lot of superstition born from ignorance. Since only the elites were literate and all.
The laws that they brought in to try and control the whole debacle were a bit heavy handed, but again, when you're dealing with extreme ignorance, that was seen as the best approach.
>- The Malleus Maleficarum is an account from the 1400s of how the church viewed and handled witchcraft. This text lays out fairly clearly that the church did no actually believe in witchcraft as modern interpretations claim. Instead they persecuted witches for the crime of denying the true natural laws of this world, and instead asserting that something's identity can be altered simply through changing how you talk about it. Most notably to me the author states that instead of actually creating whatever thing the witch wanted, they instead created something that was necessarily a twisted mockery of that thing. Because witchcraft wasn't real. That's got to sound really familiar to more than a few of you.
That sums it up doesn't it. This is why 'sorcery' is warned against. It's too easy to go bad in the hands of the inexperienced or the psychopath.