The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [58]
Obsession with demons began to reach a crescendo when, in his famous Bull of 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared,
It has come to Our ears that members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women as well as generate numerous other calamities. With this Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture and execution of countless ‘witches’ all over Europe. They were guilty of what Augustine had described as ‘a criminal tampering with the unseen world’. Despite the evenhanded ‘members of both sexes’ in the language of the Bull, unsurprisingly it was mainly girls and women who were so persecuted.
Many leading Protestants of the following centuries, their differences with the Catholic Church notwithstanding, adopted nearly identical views. Even humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More believed in witches. “The giving up of witchcraft,’ said John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, ‘is in effect the giving up of the Bible.’ William Blackstone, the celebrated jurist, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), asserted:
To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages of both the Old and New Testament.
Innocent commended ‘Our dear sons Henry Kramer and James Sprenger’ who ‘have been by Letters Apostolic delegated as Inquisitors of these heretical [de]pravities’. If ‘the abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished,’ the souls of multitudes face eternal damnation.
The Pope appointed Kramer and Sprenger to write a comprehensive analysis, using the full academic armoury of the late fifteenth century. With exhaustive citations of scripture and of ancient and modern scholars, they produced the Malleus Malefi-carum, the ‘Hammer of Witches’, aptly described as one of the most terrifying documents in human history. Thomas Ady, in A Candle in the Dark, condemned it as ‘villainous Doctrines Inventions’, ‘horrible lyes and impossibilities’, serving to hide ‘their unparalleled cruelty from the ears of the 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.
It quickly became an expense account scam. All costs of investigation, trial and execution were borne by the accused or her relatives, down toper diem for the private detectives hired to spy on her, wine for her guards, banquets for her judges, the travel expenses of a messenger sent to fetch a more experienced torturer from another city, and the faggots, tar and hangman’s rope. Then there was a bonus to the members of the tribunal for each witch burned. The convicted witch’s remaining property, if any, was divided between Church and State. As this legally and morally sanctioned mass murder and theft became institutionalized, as a vast bureaucracy arose to serve it, attention was turned from poor hags and crones to the middle class and well-to-do of both sexes.
The more who, under torture, confessed to witchcraft, the harder it was to maintain that the whole business was mere fantasy. Since each ‘witch’ was made to implicate others, the numbers grew exponentially. These constituted ‘frightful proofs that the Devil is still alive