Woman-Slaughter (witch-burning) Statistics
Excerpts from Greg Laden’s Blog (Traders Moon Ceremony November 2017)
If you ask the question, “How many witches were executed?” in any given place (Europe, America, England), you will get answers that range from fifty thousand to nine million. Conventional wisdom holds that the witch burnings were contained to three places over four centuries — England, America, and Europe, 1300’s, 1400’s and 1500’s.
The problem with those numbers is that witch-killing did not begin in 1300. There are important pre-1300 documented cases. Also, it did not end in 1700. The following account is related in Charles MacKay’s Witch Mania: The History of Witchcraft.
This passage describes the genocide of the people living in a particular part of northern Europe. They were the people of Stedinger.
The Stedinger were settlers, mostly from Holland, who opened up marshy land next to Friesland . . .. For refusing to pay tithes to the Archbishop of Bremen, a crusade was preached against them and they were wiped out in 1234.’ It is a little hard to say how many people were killed in this event. Eight thousand were killed on the field of battle, then the entire population was wiped out, supposedly.
What percentage of a typical 13th century European population goes to the field of battle (when all possible arms are raised)? Half? A fourth? Let’s take those two numbers and assume that somewhere between 25% of the population and 80% of the non-combatant population was actually killed.
If 8,000 is half the population and 25% of the balance after battle were killed, than about 10,000 people died in this once incident in the early 13th century because they were considered to be witches, the entire population having been so declared by the Pope and others. If those in battle represented only 25% of the population and 80% of the balance after the battle were killed, then the number is more like 33,000 people killed as Witches in that one event.
. . . and the practice of “playing the Witch card” applied to all of them, including the people of Stedinger as well as the old lady down the street that someone found annoying. Go ahead and read this account and see if you can make an argument that this was not a systematic genocide using the assertion that everyone in Stedinger was a Witch as the impetus for doing so.
After this time, prosecutions for witchcraft are continually mentioned, especially by the French historians. It was a crime imputed with so much ease, and repelled with so much difficulty, that the powerful, whenever they wanted to ruin the weak, and could fix no other imputation upon them, had only to accuse them of witchcraft to ensure their destruction. Instances, in which this crime was made the pretext for the most violent persecution, both of individuals and of communities, whose real offences were purely political or religious, must be familiar to every reader . . .
You can look up the story of the Stedinger genocide and it shows a complicated twenty-eight-year battle between the people and the ruling tax authority, the Catholic church, until finally, the Bishops united and wiped out every man, woman and child, stole and pillaged for anything they wanted, and then burned all evidence of the Stedinger townsfolks’ existence. Not all, of course, or we wouldn’t have this story. Truth is hard to bury that way.
Concludes the author, “Not counting this event when tallying up the number of killings of people in Europe during this period with the accusation of Witchcraft being the key indictment would be a little like ignoring the Holocaust in enumerating the murder of Jewish People in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. It would preposterous, don’t you think?”
He goes on to say that “In France, about the year 1520, fires for the execution of witches blazed in almost every town. Danaeus, in his “Dialogues of Witches,” says they were so numerous that it would be next to impossible to tell the number of them. So deep was the thralldom of the human mind, that the friends and relatives of the accused parties looked on and approved.”
The answer to the question, ‘how many women were killed for being smart and spiritually independent? How many men for standing by their women? How many children of these women? The real number is in excess of twenty-five million over eight hundred years (over thirty thousand per year, over 85 a day, approximately fifteen percent per year of any given population).
In this week where we honor our dead, where we open the veil between their world and ours, we ask the spirits of those ancestors’ whose lights were forced out ahead of their time, to bless our ventures. To bless our journeys. To help us to succeed in connecting to all of the good that hey practiced and all of the good that they stood for. Blessed be.
