4 thoughts on “Season of the witch”

  1. “The most dramatic [recent] changes in our vision of the Great Hunt [have] centered on the death toll,” notes Jenny Gibbons. She points out that estimates made prior to the mid-1970s, when detailed research into trial records began, “were almost 100% pure speculation.” (Gibbons, Recent Developments.) “On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements,” writes Robin Briggs, “a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than genocide. [See, e.g., the witch-hunt documentary “The Burning Times”.] This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 per cent were men.” Briggs adds that “these figures are chilling enough, but they have to be set in the context of what was probably the harshest period of capital punishments in European history.” (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, p. 8.)

  3. I knew someone who did archeological work in Africa and he said they would find human bones in the old trash heaps, cuz that’s where they put the dead witches. Of course there really are witches in parts of Africa and some of them use human body parts for their spells. Not always just some paranoid slander.
    9 million would have been almost as bad as the plague given Europe only had less 20 million back then

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