Witchcraft Skeptics And The Spanish Inquisition (E306)
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If you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 306, Witchcraft Skeptics and the Spanish Inquisition. As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields, and Travis View.

Hello, beloved listeners. I hope you're nice and cosy for this episode recorded in the bleak midwinter. Today's chapter of the QAA podcast is going to be about witches. These witches are less of the singing-dancing variety played by Ariana Grande, and more of the real, historical kind that were the subject of so many panics throughout history. That is to say, not real witches at all, but largely low-status, poor, and frequently elderly women

who were scapegoated and brutalized by the communities they relied upon until they confessed to terrible crimes for which they were then punished. So very much not the fun kind of witches. Sorry about that. The witches that they did burn. The witches that they very much did burn. Everybody knows they're the most fun.

We are still darkly fascinated by witch hunts, perhaps because of what we fear they reveal about our desire for community and belonging. They're a reminder that those close bonds of kinship we often valorise and maybe even envy in the past usually came at someone's expense and sometimes in very brutal ways. We in our more enlightened, civilised times have a lingering anxiety about whether hunting witches is something we've really fully outgrown.

This is probably why in the United States, the city of Salem in Massachusetts holds such an outsized cultural footprint in the American imagination. In the United Kingdom, it's not a place and more of a person in Matthew Hopkins, the self-titled Witchfinder General, although that's partially owing to his excellent portrayal by the thespian legend Vincent Price in the 1960s folk horror of the same name. "You are all of you confessed idolaters."

However, these proceedings shall be carried out through due process of law. What law demands, we shall satisfy. You will each be tied in a prescribed fashion and cast into the moat. Should you then sink, we will know that your confessions are false. If, on the other hand, you are seen to swim or float,

Then your confessions of witchcraft are proven beyond a doubt in the sight of God. And you will be withdrawn from the water and hanged by the neck until you are dead. You can't help me! I'm over this! Vincent Price getting rid of all the wives so he can have the husbands. You're all witches!

You have something very ugly down there. Sir, I must confess, I am a warlock as well. I shall travel up to the gallows with the rest of the women. And he's like, no, no, not you. Your crimes are forgiven.

Yeah, I mean, it's a great movie, Witchfinder in general. But one thing I found out way later, I think maybe just like a couple of years ago after watching it, is that, you know, Vincent Price plays Matthew Hopkins as such a horrifying kind of patriarchal villain. But the real Matthew Hopkins was actually probably only in his early to mid-20s when he kind of...

just goes on his rampage through southern, southeastern England and kind of executes hundreds and hundreds of people and probably died when he was at most 27. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Mangione age. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Kurt Cobain. I mean, a lot of people talk about 27, you know, that's a famous age that famous people die. But like back then that was also 27 was like 67, you know, life expectancy isn't what it is nowadays. So yeah, maybe, I guess, I don't know. I guess it gives it like a different flavor to me thinking of him as like a young man as a, I don't know, you know, kind of young men getting like hopped up on

you know, on these ideologies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a manosphere guy, basically. Yeah. Yeah.

But today I want to touch on a specific side of this dreadful history, which I think often gets missed in our popular imaginings of the topic. Because where there have always been witch hunts, there have also always been sceptics. Those annoying little pedants who pop up when you and the boys are just really getting on a roll to point out that actually there could be lots of reasons why all the cows got sick this year. Travis! Yeah.

You are sinking or floating or whichever one proves that it's you. We are basically going to be looking at a bunch of historical Travis views. That's correct.

Yeah, I remember when I first started getting interested in skepticism in college, I learned the story of Celsus, who was one of the earliest known skeptics of Christianity. And he was a critic of Christianity from the pagan perspective. And the only reason we know about the existence of Celsus is because one of the church fathers, Origen, wrote a book sort of criticizing Celsus.

And this criticism includes some quotes from Celsus. Otherwise, the existence of the skeptic would be totally obliterated. We wouldn't even know that this person even existed had not the Christian church fathers preserved their work.

So when I read that, I was like, oh, I just kind of made peace that skeptics generally are kind of forgotten by history because the passion of belief is what people remember. We are looking to kind of invest in an AI that could remove Travis Few from all our former episodes. So yeah, it's a historical example of haters making you famous, I guess. Yeah, I mean, certainly in Julian's case. What? What?

I'm a lover. This is the season of love. How dare you? Merry Christmas, by the way. I'm Jewish. That's, you know. Merry Christmas, you evil Jew. Malleus Maleficarum.

From a modern, secular point of view, it's difficult to empathise with what was once an entirely commonplace understanding of the world: that witches disguised themselves among the general population, secretly causing acts of evil to befall their friends and neighbours. If we try to grasp why this understanding was so widespread in history, we usually will think up something like this:

Humans have a natural desire to understand why bad things happen, but we're operating in a time of very rudimentary scientific knowledge. This argument says that the natural search for answers when a perfectly healthy-seeming child dies in their sleep or a subsistence farmer's crops have suddenly failed essentially created the figure of the witch, the hidden, malicious agent of evil who ensures that bad things happen to good people. But one thing that this argument misses is that belief in witches and witchcraft

hasn't actually always been an eternal constant in pre-enlightenment Europe, or even in Christianity. I spoke to Professor Marion Gibson from the University of Exeter and author of Witchcraft, A History in Thirteen Trials. She explained to me how popular belief in witches and the desire to persecute them depended heavily on what else was happening in a particular society at the time. Beliefs in witches come and go over historical time, really.

So there are times when people find the idea of the witch more useful, I think. And that can be if they're under a lot more stress than in previous times. So, you know, if you live in a time of international war or civil war, famine, famine,

or climate change or particular stresses around religion. Those kind of things are all the sort of triggers that we might expect to kick off an enhanced belief in witches and magic, and also a desire to do something about it. So, you know, these beliefs can bump along in the

background of human history quite nicely. But there do come times when people think, right, we really must do something about this. We must hold a witch trial. We must hold these people to account. We must drive them out of our society. We must kill them in some societies. So there are periods of witch trials where things peak and an interest in that kind of thing peaks. But there are also times where people would just tolerate the idea of witches and magic much more happily.

And we'll even, you know, incorporate them into folk tales and popular culture and talk about them in a quite normal manner. Seen a couple of them over New Jersey, honestly. I have a feeling we're entering a period where we'll be seeing more witches based on those criteria. Isn't that weird, you know, when happy times, the witches, they seem to just...

disappear i think it's actually really interesting that that's not actually what she said at all that that during happier times people are just like no we love witches now actually we want to put them in cool stories we we actually they're really fun they're really good times and then you know stressful bad times they're like we we need to eradicate these people from society with our own hands that's right it's like my emotional support witch hunt

In fact, what we think of as the classic witch hunt, where state institutions attempt to prosecute acts of magic as a crime, is actually a more stable feature of what is known as the modern era. This began when we invented the printing press and essentially give ourselves the first ever cases of posters madness.

Early church doctrine actually condemned burning people accused of witchcraft as a superstitious holdover from the bad old days of paganism. In fact, as one official church document on the matter said, anyone not sanctioned by the church who claimed to be able to do magic had in fact probably just been hoodwinked by the devil. Some unconstrained women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of

demons believe and openly profess that in the dead of the night they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess Diana with a countless horde of women and in the silence of the dead of the night to fly over vast tracts of country and

innumerable multitude deceived by this false opinion believe this to be true and so believing wander from the right faith and relapse into pagan errors when they think that there is any divinity or power except the one god

Man, it must have been so shit back then, because like...

Dreams are insane. Like, everybody must have been waking up just feeling like, oh my god, I am going to hell. Oh, what was that? What the fuck happened? That is, that was crazy. Night after night, you're just more and more convinced that, like, Satan is personally haunting you. You wake up in a cold sweat and you go, and nowadays it's just like, oh man, it was just a bad dream. Back then it was like, oh, oh man, it was a bad dream. And I'm going to the gallows.

Yeah. I think, yeah, one of the greatest innovations of the modern world is that you can have an experience that's totally meaningless. It used to be everything was just heavy with meaning. Everything was significant. Now, if something could happen and say that was just one for the void, it means nothing. Yeah.

Yeah, just being able to be like, huh, whatever, is just actually a huge privilege. One for the Void, I think, should be the title of your book, Travis. That's a great title. Because it's you, one for the Void. Another one offered up for the Void. Talking about his ticket. One for the Void, please.

So, while belief in magic itself was very much widespread, the idea that witches themselves were capable of stunts that exceeded a normal human's natural capabilities was actually much less historically stable. Now, this might seem like quite a subtle distinction and it probably didn't mean much to you if you were one of the poor witches who got executed during this time anyway, but it's quite an important one for the purposes of our story.

Marion explained to me how mass witch hunts, as we understand them, required an extra political dimension. People could think about witches in different ways. So they can think about them as heretics, as members of an anti-Christian underground cult, if you like.

on the one hand, but they can also think about them as people who might not be members of such a cult, which might not exist, but on the other hand, are still really problematic in a community. So some people in, say, medieval or 16th century society might think, oh, you know, there's a massive conspiracy of witches. There are going to be hundreds of them in our community. We really need to find them and root them out. Whereas other people will be more concerned about the individual and their kind of

their ordinary private life. So they might think the woman down the road has cursed my child or my cow. You know, I don't believe she's a Satan worshipper or a member of some kind of alternative church, but I'm still concerned that she's using magic in some way that bothers me and is wrong. And

Really society comes to the idea of mass witch trials when those two ideas come together. So you get the popular idea of witchcraft, you know, the she has bewitched my cow version of it, coming together with the Inquisitor's idea of it. There is a massive conspiracy of people who are working against society and government and true religion. When you get those two ideas coming together, you get witch trials. I like that it was just so common before.

to bewitch cows and it's like you know the my cow is bewitched version yeah that's just a type of witchcraft obviously it's when the cow gives shitty milk yeah i mean having read a lot of witch trial documents for this that is actually one of the most common kind of god damn it that's so funny my cow ain't working right where the fuck are these witches i'm gonna find them and kill them

Imagine you're just given these amazing powers by the devil and you're like, hmm, what am I going to do with these? I can actually relate to this because I used some magic a couple of months ago that my neighbor didn't like. It was that my sprinklers were on a little bit too long and the water was running downhill. So she came and knocked on my door and she was like, there's a river of water coming.

Water going by my house. Amazing. And so did you cease your magic? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I walked over to the back of the garage where my crystal ball, my alchemy set is. And I mixed a couple potions and shut off the sprinklers. And we haven't heard from her since. So I'm looking to put a hex on her Cybertruck next. She has a Cybertruck? Yeah.

God, I've been seeing them everywhere. It's like a matte black one. If there are witches out there, please, please make these vehicles erupt into flames. Kind of sounds like they don't need to do that. Yeah, that's

Yes, the head witch of them all has made sure that they are shitty vehicles. Elon Musk. You can slit your wrist open just trying to open the trunk because the metal is unfinished on it. You don't even need it to erupt in flames. It'll literally just open your veins for you. Cool.

By 1484, official Catholic scepticism about witches' magical practices had transformed dramatically, as illustrated by a papal bull issued by Pope Innocent VIII. In this, the church affirmed its belief in witches and, crucially, their demonic powers. Many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi.

and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities, and horrid offenses, have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees. These wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, as well as

Animals with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external. They're responsible for my hemorrhoids. They hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving. They blasphemously stopped me from busting. They blasphemously... They blasphemously renounced that...

Wait, I love it that they're like, can't get a boner? Yeah. The devil has plagued you. They blasphemously renounce that faith which is theirs by the sacrament of baptism. And at the instigation of the devil, they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls. The abominations and enormities in question remain unpublished, not without open danger to the souls of many.

and peril of eternal damnation. See, the church used to be metal. Let's get back to this, guys. The shit that Annie practices now sucks compared to this. Oh, man. Julian's gone trad-cath. I really didn't expect this to happen from this episode. That's right. Hello, it's me. Hello, it's me, Dasha. And I'm here to talk to you about how men don't nut-write anymore. Or at all.

Sometimes the man doesn't finish, the woman is not inseminated. For centuries, men are now played nutting inward and supposed to outward. Ah, fuck.

Of course it's about this shit. Of course. That's so awesome. They're like, this is really bad. Like halfway through their fucking statement. And we're not, we just can't get it up and we can't comment anymore. It's like, guys, please try to focus. You're not even allowed. You're the church. You're not even allowed to fuck. No, it's true. It's a huge self-report, if anything. Yeah, the self-report. It's like, the young boys no longer do it for me. I demand that these choir boys arouse me.

Pope Innocent had drawn up this bull at the urging of a man called Heinrich Kramer, a zealous and ambitious German priest who worked for the Inquisition, the judicial body that the Catholic Church set up to stamp out heresy. Kramer had become increasingly concerned about the dangers of witchcraft, but had run up against opposition in his witch-hunting activities from local authorities. Man, the Germans are really on the wrong side of fucking everything, aren't they? They just manage to pull it off every time.

Kramer was, if not the worst historical figure to ever operate in Germany, certainly in the top 100. Empowered by the publication of the Papal Bull, he promptly travelled to Innsbruck, a city nestled in a valley between the Austrian Alps, in search of some magical offenders. Unsurprisingly, given his passion for the topic, he soon found them. At one point, about 50 suspects had been rounded up for witchcraft, 48 of which were women. God, man, this is...

I will travel to Innsbruck where I will find neuro-atypical and ugly women. We are going to jail them.

Fucking hell. Here too, however, Kramer's investigation ran into difficulties. The local bishop belonged to the older theological tradition on witches, which believed them to have been deceived by evil spirits, potentially in league with the devil, but for the most part, pretty harmless. He was less than enthusiastic then about a newcomer showing up and stirring up discord in his diocese. That's awesome. So he shows up and it's like, hey man, listen, we've got a brown paper bag policy.

OK, as long as the witches are in brown paper bags, we do not prosecute. That's it. He's like, yeah, we've got it handled. Yeah, it's a classic thing of just like people who become textual literalists and especially like the kind of younger or, you know, newly adopted. Like if you've just adopted religion, you know, you're just like you're wiling out in ways that like you're, you know, the people who've been around for a while are like, no, we don't actually need to start hunting women in our village.

Yeah, that's it. And I feel like the bishop is just a bit like, hey, man, I have to live among these people. You're just going to, like, piss off and do your inquisition duties. But, like, this is my community. What was more, the bishop couldn't help but notice that Cramer going about his inquisitorial duties was unethical.

In the nicest terms possible, being a bit of a pervert about things. As the historian P.J. Maxwell Stewart reports, "Kramer, it seems, was particularly interested in pursuing certain lines of questioning. He wanted to elucidate the part played by Satan in these magical workings."

He was keen to discover details about unguents supposedly made from babies' bodies, and he pressed one witch in particular, Helena Scheuberin, about her sexual practices and her moral standing in the community. They were doing adrenochrome already. Yeah. Unguents made from babies' bodies. God, fuck. Yeah, it's a big thing of Kramer's that, like, yeah, specifically unbaptized babies, I think he says, that witches, yeah, like...

uh, like press into ointments and stuff. I think it's, um, that movie, the witch actually shows it. Mm.

Kramer pushed this line of questioning so far that not just the bishop but his fellow commissioners began to object and the trial stalled after devolving into a debate about his competence for the job. Helena Scheuberin and her fellow witches were set free, supposedly while the trial was postponed, but Kramer's behaviour seemed to have fully killed off any appetite to see them prosecuted. By February 1486, public opinion of Kramer was so low that he was strongly advised to leave the city for his own safety. Kramer

Kramer had something of a poster spirit about him though and so he decided to generate his outrage at this humiliating experience into a lengthy book explaining why the haters and losers were all wrong and he was right. This book was called The Malleus Maleficarum and would become

one of the most influential pieces of writing about witchcraft for the next 300 years. Historians are divided about how responsible the Malleus can really be said to be for kicking off the witch hunt craze of those centuries, but it's undeniable that it was used as the legal blueprint for hundreds of witch trials across Europe, making Cramer and his co-author, fellow inquisitor Jacob Sprenger, indirectly responsible for thousands of executions of people that we now, of course, know were innocent.

The historian Hans-Peter Breudel discusses the significance of Malleus in popularizing a new form of witch panic for the modern era. Certainly there had been witch treatises before, but these had either refrained from making sweeping judgments, had remained agreeably obscure, or had avoided doctrinal pronouncements altogether. The Malleus, on the other hand, was readily available in printed editions, addressed thorny doctrinal problems without flinching from or even acknowledging their problematic consequences.

and looked at an old but always disturbing subject in a new way. Witchcraft had for centuries remained on the periphery of church doctrine and, although

And, although always a grave sin and a serious concern, it had never before been considered a cause for real alarm. In the Malleus, though, witchcraft was elevated to a pivotal position in the struggle between man and the devil and was given new responsibility for the world's ever-increasing ills. The Malleus, in other words, proposed a basic shift in the way in which the Church should conceptualize evil.

In brief, the authors of Malleus argued that witches' powers were real, granted to them by the devil, and they were extremely dangerous. In fact, there was very rarely any seemingly random act of misfortune that couldn't be attributed to evil magic of some kind. But even before any particular act of black magic, witches were defined by their embrace of the devil, an embrace that was very much not just a metaphor.

The physical relationship between witches, demons, and the devil himself was one that Cramer wrote about in lurid detail. "Witches have to do four deeds for the increase of that perfidy. That is, to deny the Catholic faith in whole or in part through verbal sacrilege, to devote themselves body and soul to the devil, to offer up to the evil one himself, infants not yet baptized,

and to persist in diabolic filthiness through carnal acts with incubus and succubus demons. Okay, so, yeah. Ladies having pleasure. Bad. Yeah, but not like with men. Even if it is with men, it's like, actually, no, that's a demon inside of him or a demon inside of her.

When I spoke to Marian Gibson, she said that Kramer's focus on the sexualised element of witchcraft rituals alongside Malleus' virulent misogyny helped establish it as one of the most notable demonological texts over the centuries. I know Kramer's a really important figure in the transformation of medieval society from being a society that broadly tolerates ideas of witches and magic to being a society that hunts down witches wherever it can find them.

them. And he's important because he gets the idea that there is this mass conspiracy of people against the church and the state and they're anti-Christians. And he thinks that most of them are women. He does say that it's quite possible to be a male witch. And most people across most of history have thought that absolutely that is possible. But he is obsessed with the idea that most of the accused witches will be women.

and he seems by modern standards rampantly misogynistic he says terrible things about women he says they're intellectually like children he says when when they speak they they speak evil that they're gossipy that they're untrustworthy that they're faithless in every way um

And that particularly they are likely to be seduced by the devil, seduced both sexually, which is the thing that really unfortunately interests him, but also that they're likely to be seduced away from true faith. You know, they will believe the devil's lies and they will end up falling into heresies and they'll end up being the devil's people.

if you like. He's worse than many others. He's certainly not the only person who thinks there's a big conspiracy of witches and we need to hunt them down and we need to kill them. He's not the only person who thinks that, but he is one of the leaders of, of that group, if you like. Um,

And he seems more misogynistic than many of the others. It feels like there's a real personal investment in hating and pursuing women in him that can't quite be explained by just saying, oh, he's a man of his time or, you know, oh, well, some people in the church thought like that. It feels personal for him. I don't know. Yeah, it seems like misogyny really is the accelerant that makes like extremist or paranoid movements take off.

Yeah, right. When she was talking about this, it like really made me think of me and Julian's research on man clan and how, you know, there's so many influencers out there that will kind of tell young men the same thing. They'll say, you know, you need to get your life together. You need to go to the gym. You need to start eating this diet or whatever. But it's almost like there's so many of them that kind of distinguish yourself among those people. It's the kind of misogyny. That's the, it's the kind of, and it's women's fault that you're this way in the first place. And here's all the ways that they're like terrible. That's the kind of,

extra spice that kind of you need to sort of like, yeah, rise head and shoulders above the others. And it kind of sounded a bit like there was something similar going on with Kramer and Malleus, you know, he just like had that extra, extra element of women hating, even for the 15th century. The Witchcraft Skeptics

But, you will be pleased to hear, not everyone was convinced. One early sceptic of witchcraft was Andreas Fernandes de Laguna, the physician of Emperor Charles V and Philip II of Spain, who lived in the early half of the 16th century. Laguna, in his translation of an older classical text on medicinal plants,

would add an account of a curious experiment he performed. Noting that the original text suggests that dram of nightshade can cause hallucinations, Laguna told the story of a husband and wife in the city of Metz, who had been accused of bewitching a high-ranking noble and summarily sentenced to death. Among their possessions, which had been seized as evidence, was...

a certain green ointment with a strong smell, which Laguna deduced to be composed of hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake. He continues, "...through the constable, who was a friend of mine. I obtained a good supply of the ointment, and later in the city of Metz I had the wife of the public executioner anointed with it from head to foot. She had completely lost power of sleep and had become half insane in consequence."

This seemed to me to be an excellent opportunity to undertake a test of the witch's ointment. And so it turned out, for no sooner did I anoint her, that she opened her eyes wide like a rabbit, and soon they looked like those of a cook.

When she was finally woken up after 36 hours, Laguna's test subject complained. She had been having a wonderful time while asleep, she said, not least because she had apparently cheated on her husband in her dreams with a younger and lustier lover. She wore herself out, beseeching us to allow her to return to her pleasant dreams, Laguna said. But,

But, little by little, he and her husband were able to distract her from what he called her "illusions" and "crazy notions". Nonetheless, the whole experience led him to some conclusions about so-called witches. From all this we may infer that all those wretched witches do and say is caused by potions and ointments which so corrupt their memory and their imagination that they create their own woes, for they firmly believe when awake all that they had dreamed when asleep.

So, in short, Laguna stated, all these claims that witches made about their magical powers could in fact be summed up as the ramblings of your friend who's just tried hallucinogenic drugs for the first time. But, who was to blame for having introduced them to the drug in the first place? Well, according to Laguna, that would be the devil. Nevertheless, most of all that those witches say is mental illness, nothing else, for neither their spirit nor their body moves from the place where they collapse into unconsciousness.

This is great because the skeptic is just going, "I disagree with about how the devil is causing this."

Yeah. He's like, no mistake, it is the devil, but how? That's a different story for a different time. Mm.

No, that's what I really like about these stories. You know, they are skeptics and they are kind of coming or dancing around a conclusion that we all agree with. But they're just like, they just have such a different epistemology. Do you know, they have such a different kind of understanding of the world that even when he's like, I don't think they're performing magic. He's like, but obviously the devil is the one who gave them the ointment in the first place. Yeah.

Laguna then essentially demoted the devil from Kramer's vision of a terrifying figure capable of granting his earthly minions demonic powers to something more like the drug dealer character in those cautionary plays they put on in school assemblies. It seems unlikely to me that he was actually correct and that everyone who was forced to confess to magical acts had in fact been secretly tripping balls, but it was a start.

Another witch hunter critic writing a little later in the 16th century was the English gentleman Reginald Scott. Reginald Scott's fascinating. He's such an interesting writer because he's so rude. He comes across as really modern in his writing. And I think he would have absolutely loved modern times. He would have loved the online world. He would have loved controversy in discussion forums and on social media because he really likes to have a go at his opponents. And the way he does that...

are really interesting too. He's one of those people who uses a theological defence. So he's actually quite good at presenting himself as a better Christian than his opponents and saying, actually, you've misinterpreted the Bible. The Bible doesn't say any of that. It doesn't say that there are witches in the ways that you thought there are.

And he's rude about individuals as well. One of the ways that he chooses to take down his opponents is to attack them personally, which is something we're really familiar with now. So he will say about a particular accuser or magistrate, this man is an idiot.

He's got these really stupid ideas in his head. Oh, and he's corrupt as well. You know, he's lied to the people he's supposed to be questioning. He's behaved appallingly to them. He's just a bully. You should pay no attention to him at all because he's just a fool. So that's one of the things that he does. And he makes all these attacks on demonologists and witch-hunting magistrates in a book called The Discovery of Witchcraft, which he publishes in the 1580s in England. And it's a big fat

book. So he has spent absolutely years on this. He's just a perfectly ordinary country gentleman. The only other book that he wrote during the course of his life was a treatise about how to grow hops. So, you know, the stuff that flavours beer. So he's a really ordinary individual and he uses that in his arguments as well. So he presents himself as just a plain man. You know, somebody who's discovered the truth about witches.

broadly that they don't really exist or not in the way that accusers say they do, just by common sense. He's also got a section on conjuring tricks as well. So one of the things that Scott suggested was that actually when people thought they saw witchcraft and magic in the world, actually they were just seeing conjuring tricks. You know, they were seeing sleight of hand or they were seeing illusion of some kind. And he presents all these examples of early modern stage magic.

Which is really interesting. You know, there's this kind of whole history of conjuring going alongside his history of witchcraft. And he uses that really effectively to make people think about whether they can trust the evidence of their eyes or not. I mean, that's pretty remarkable because that is really, it feels like a really a core element of skepticism that you can perceive something and be very convinced and even, you know, through all your senses, believe it to be true. But it's just, you didn't actually see what you thought you did. Hmm.

Yeah, no, it's like really interesting. Yeah, a really interesting element, I think, of his book where he's just sort of like, he's not trying to convince people who've just heard about witchcraft, but people who may have even think that they've seen it as well, which, yeah, is a tough sell. And I think he's kind of quite conscious of that, that he has to sort of like unpick at people's core experiences, essentially. Yeah.

One thing I find fascinating about Scott is how he's arguing for a conclusion that's so completely uncontroversial to a modern secular audience, that witches aren't real. But he argues it in ways that we would never dream of. Here, for example, is one passage in his book in which he points out that witches can't have been a phenomenon in the days of Job, the unlucky character in the Old Testament, who essentially gets his life ruined by God for a laugh.

"Until you have perused my book, ponder this in your mind: that witches are not once found written in the Old or New Testament, and that Christ himself in his Gospel never mentioned the name of a witch, and that neither he nor Moses ever spake any one word of the witches' bargain with the devil, their nagging, their riding in the air, their transferring of corn or grasses from one field to another, their herding of children or cattle with words or charms, their bewitching of butter,

cheese, ale, etc., nor yet their transubstantiation, insomuch as the writers hereupon are not ashamed to say that it is not absurd to affirm that there were no witches in Job's time. The reason is that if there had been such witches there, Job would have said he had been bewitched. But indeed, man took no heed in those days to this doctrine of devils, these fables of witchcraft.

The irony of all this is that if a woman had done the things that Jesus had done, she would have been a witch and executed instead of God. Yeah, Jesus was a real nag. Yeah, turning water into wine, walking on water, all of that stuff. All of that stuff. That's witchcraft. He was, of course, executed as well. Well, yeah. Well, yeah, but I mean, you know, in the good way, the way that you get to come back. Yeah. Yeah.

And it took a while. I mean, you know what I mean? Like it took a little bit of time. I mean, if he had been a woman, he would have been hanged, I don't know, like two weeks after the first miracle. That's true. He wouldn't have really had time to amass a following all these great guys that followed him around.

Furthermore, Scott took the time in his book to argue against using violence on women. A significant point given that torture, or at least a light bit of beating, was a pretty accepted feature in how accusations of witchcraft were both investigated and punished. In fact, in at least one Scottish witch trial that I read about, the fact that a man had stopped hitting his wife was used as evidence against her that she must have bewitched him. LAUGHTER

Against that backdrop, here's Scott winning the Greatest Feminist Ally of the 16th Century award. "For if nature has taught a lion not to deal so roughly with a woman as with a man because she is in body the weaker vessel, and in heart inclined to pity, what should a man do in this case, for whom a woman is created as a help and comfort unto him? In so much as, even in the law of nature, it is a greater offence to kill a woman than a man."

Not because man is not the more excellent creature, but because a woman is the weaker vessel, and therefore among all modest and honest persons, it is thought a shame to offer violence or injury to a woman. Sorry for getting woke on you guys there.

Now, though, it's time to get to one of my favourite witchcraft sceptics of history. This time, a Spanish priest, born in 1564, called Alonso de Salazar Frias. Unlike the other figures we've covered, Andreas de Laguna or Reginald Scott, Salazar never published his thoughts about witchcraft for public consumption.

We only know his story because the Spanish Inquisition, alongside its terrifying reputation for mass executions and torture, was also a pretty well-organized bureaucracy which both produced and then meticulously archived a hell of a lot of paperwork. And de Salazar, probably more than any other one person, is responsible for having saved hundreds and indirectly perhaps thousands of lives through his steadfast refusal to play along with a local witch hunt that flared up in the Basque region of northern Spain in the early 17th century.

First things first, I should get some attributions out of the way. I can only tell you about this story due to the tireless research of the folklorist Gustav Henningsen, who wrote a fantastic book about de Salazar called The Witch's Advocate. Henningsen also undertook the work of translating all of the relevant Inquisition documents that we'll quote here into English. Sadly, he died in 2023, so I wasn't able to interview him for this episode, but this section is very much dependent on his work.

Our story begins not in Spain, but right across the border in southern France, in what was then known as the region of Le Borde in northern Basque Country. In 1608, a local squabble arose between a lord and some of his subjects. As was not uncommon for disputes between neighbours at the time, accusations of witchcraft began to fly. King Henri IV asked a parliamentary councillor in Bordeaux called Pierre de L'Ancq to look into the accusations, punish the guilty, and generally put the whole ugly affair to rest.

This turned out to be an unwise move, as it turns out that Delonk was actually something of a maniac. In just a few months, hundreds of people were rounded up and interrogated. When they inevitably cracked under questioning and accused other people around them, sometimes their enemies, sometimes their friends and families, those people too were imprisoned, interrogated and tortured until they had named all of their so-called accomplices.

About 80 witches would end up being executed, but Deloncq, who would later write extensively about his experiences, believed that there were many more, perhaps 2,000 or so, who would escape justice. I spoke too soon about the Germans. I knew the French would get dragged into this. Yeah. You're not getting off that easy. Fuck.

Hmm.

What's more, because their fathers and husbands were at sea so much, the women were wild and untamed. And the devil makes use of their depraved inclinations, bad customs and habits, and all that these people have of a vicious and corrupt disposition. There is no reason to be astonished if by ruse and artifice the devil causes them to run easily to witchcraft, this abomination enticing them with all the practices that play on the same fickleness.

Traits like curiosity, the desire for new things, festivals, dancing, and voyages across the sea, for which they have more inclination than any other people in the universe. Oh man, the Basques are so awesome. Support for the Basque separatist movement. You should have done it way earlier. This is basically like, to make a long story short, like, a town I do not like.

These people are having fun. They're curious. They have a desire for new things. They like festivals, dancing, voyages across the fucking sea. Jesus Christ. Is there anything bad? I think one thing that Americans just like often struggle to understand about Europe is like how capable we are of like being racist to somebody who literally just like lives in the next town over. Yeah. Just north to south and like a tiny country less than the size of a state.

Yeah, this is just like a guy from like the middle of France just talking about some guys from slightly further down in the south of France to him. And he's just like, they're savage and untamed nature. You should ask a Parisian about people from Marseille or vice versa. Vicious.

As to why there had been such a sudden flare-up of devilish magic now, DeLonk had an answer for that too. The work of Christian missionaries in the far-flung corners of the globe had been so successful that he'd sent all the pagan devils and demons scrambling to this hospitable environment. This makes me believe that after the devotion and good instruction of so many devout religious figures...

chased the demons and the evil angels from the Indies, Japan, and other places, they were unleashed on Christendom in large numbers. And having found that both the people and the terrain here are well disposed, they have made it their principal abode, and little by little they are making themselves the

absolute rulers of the country, having won over the women, the children, and most of the preachers and pastors. It is a fact that many travelers coming in search of wine to the city of Bordeaux have assured us that during their travels they have observed large hordes of demons in frightening human shapes passing through France. This is why the number of witches is so large in the Labours, and why so many souls are led astray. To think that they could be retrieved or deterred by the path of justice seems utterly impossible.

One thing that thwarted Delonq's ambition to rid the area of its scourge of witches was that Laborde was a border region. As more and more people were rounded up, tortured and burned at the stake, some decided it would be better to take their chances in Spain. Soon all of the towns and villages on the other side of the border knew about the witchcraft epidemic in Laborde and it didn't take long for it to spread.

It certainly doesn't seem like a coincidence that one of the first recorded accusations we have from Spain came from a 20-year-old woman who had spent the last four years living in France. Maria de Chimildegui said that she had been part of a French coven of witches for 18 months, but that during her time there, she had flown across the border to attend Sabbaths at Sugaramurdi, a tiny town that rests under the western part of the Pyrenees Mountains, and where she now lived.

One of the women that Shemelda Guy accused of being part of this witch's meeting, Maria de Heretigia, when learning that her name had come up, went to confront her accuser. Henningsen recounts what happens next. The French girl recounted the details of the Sabbath so vividly and spoke so eloquently that the listeners gradually became convinced. And at last, the family began to put pressure on Maria de Heretigia to make her confess when the young wife realized she had no way of escape.

Oh, man. Your cool aunt? That's how you're gonna do her in the end? Come on.

Taught you how to roll your first joint, you know, make your first, you know, eye of newt potion. You're going to throw her under the gallows like that? Come on. As was a common feature of witch panics at the time, this began something of a chain reaction. First across the village and then the region more broadly, as more and more witches were rounded up and forced to confess and then name their magical accomplices.

The picture the witches painted was a horrifying one. They described a vast and sprawling witchcraft sect all across the Navaran hills, who gained new recruits by kidnapping young and impressionable children while they slept and bringing them to their covens, called Akelares.

Here they would learn the rites and rituals of witchcraft before finally, when they came of age, renouncing their Christian faith and bonding themselves forever to the devil. Just as Kramer described in Malleus Maleficarum, published over a hundred years before, many of the women and men describe performing sexual acts both with the devil and each other. But this was only the beginning of their crimes.

The witches confessed to sneaking into houses and sucking the blood of children while their parents slept. Others had cast curses on their neighbours over petty slights, causing them injury, illness or death. And they had thus far remained undetected as the devil had given them not only the power of flight, but the ability to create a spectral doppelganger who looked exactly like them to sleep in their beds.

This meant that while they were away doing their various diabolical misdeeds, not even their families had noticed they were missing. On the other hand, some of the confessions revealed details which, at least from my point of view, were downright adorable. For instance, each novice witch was given a toad, which was dressed in its own unique little outfit. According to Henningsen:

The toad was the witch's guardian angel and advisor. It lived in the witch's house where it had a special hiding place so that it could not be seen by intruders. The witch fed it every day on maize, bread, and wine. And the toad ate with its four legs and guzzled like a pig. If it did not get enough to eat, it complained and threatened to tell the devil. Oh, this is fun. This sounds like my relationship with Jake. This sounds awesome. Yeah, but who's threatening to tell the devil what?

I don't know. Yeah, no, it was like actually a feature of all the, because all of these confessions were, you know, meticulously written down by the Inquisition. On each one, the witch that gets a toad like describes like, oh, this one was in blue and gold robes and this one was in purple. That's incredible. So that means if this is, if this is real, that somebody had to knit a

bunch of little toad clothes, the little toad dresses and shoes and outfits. Yeah. It's actually a wonderful idea. Like it really is speaking. No, funnily enough, there is actually, yeah, they obviously never, they never get any of these toads. And at one point, one woman does offer to show them like the hiding place where her toad is. Um, but when they get there, there's nothing there. And they deduce that the devil must have magicked, magicked it away. Hmm.

Anyway, I found that detail kind of cute, but needless to say, the Spanish Inquisition did not see it that way. No. 31 people were arrested and taken to a prison in Logroño, where the regional Inquisition office resided to await their trial. Given the large number of suspects by this point, the investigation was a pretty lengthy one, with the combined factors of many of the prisoners already being pretty old...

17th century jails hardly being the peak of sanitary conditions, by the time the actual trial rolled around in the autumn of 1610, only 18 suspects were left surviving. Oh my god. Yeah, it was, you did not want to go to prison in this time. Of these,

Incredible. Probably one of the most painful ways to go, that they're like, I just...

I just can't fucking, I don't want to tell them that I'm a witch. Yeah, it's kind of incredible bravery, I actually think. Like, yeah. Because we obviously know they were innocent, you know? Well, let's not. Sorry, I don't want to prejudice. Prejudice matters.

The local Inquisitor's Council consisted of three men, Alonso Bequerra y Holquín, Juan de Bale Alborado, and the youngest and most junior councillor, Alonso de Salazar Frias. Salazar had actually joined halfway through the initial investigation, and had voiced some doubts, albeit only privately at this point. He pointed out, for example, that the witch's various description of what the black masses looked like differed extraordinarily from person to person, as did their accounts of who else had attended.

What's more, very little had been done, he said, to prevent cross-witness contamination. And when witches did talk to each other in the jails, it hadn't been recorded. So there was no way of knowing if they'd just been feeding each other details to make their stories match up.

When Salazar voiced these concerns, however, he had been shouted down by his colleagues, quite literally, as he would later write in a letter of complaint to La Suprema, the centralized base of operations for the Inquisition. When we were sitting in the tribunal, Devayet rose from his chair, screaming and cursing, and shouted that if I ever contradicted him, he would never leave me in peace. And this he said so beside himself with rage that he completely neglected to

So now you know the Spanish Inquisition was also something of a toxic workplace. LAUGHTER

Finding it hard to get along with these people. Unfortunately, the trial and mass executions of 1610 had done nothing to abate the local witch panic. Part of the problem was that several local ecclesiastical types had gotten extremely excited about the opportunity to save so many damned souls. Or, if you're of the more cynical bent, make a name for themselves. These priests were now travelling from town to town preaching about the evils of witchcraft.

The result was, of course, lots of impressionable children listening to this, dreaming about witches and starting a new panic when they told their parents. As the abbot of Ordaz, a local monastery, wrote to the Inquisition: "The evil has now gone so far that we are no longer concerned that there are witches, although they are being exposed by the dozen. If only they refrain from bewitching or infecting others. I am thinking particularly about the children, for it makes me weep blood when I see the parents crying to heaven for aid."

Dude, if you're weeping blood, maybe you're one of them. No, that's just, that's a normal Catholic thing. Don't worry. Oh, right. Yeah. I feel so much about this. It makes me weep blood.

In some places, the problem was reaching epidemic levels. In the town of Achala, according to Henningsen, the locals had become... Completely dominated by the witch craze. People sat up with their quote-unquote bewitched children every night in order to prevent them from sleeping, but this apparently only resulted in the witches taking them to Sabbath by day. For every time an exhausted child dozed off for a moment, he would wake up immediately claiming that witches had been to fetch him. A

Okay, so he's like, they're like, yeah, this is good. Once you tell the kids that like any bad behavior can just be blamed on witches, they're like, this is amazing. I'm going to press this button over and over and over. Yeah. And also just like, yeah, you're kind of just like filling their, filling their minds with stuff of witches. And what do you know? They like fall asleep and they're instantly like, oh my God, I saw a witch in my dream. Yep. So cool.

People were getting restless and in some places resorting to violence against the people their children accused. In May 1611, de Salazar, as a member of the local council who had not yet travelled to the afflicted area, was sent to investigate. What he discovered was a regional tinderbox. Neighbours were accusing neighbours who were in turn hurling counter-accusations right back at them.

Frequently, if someone was bullied into making a confession, they'd take the chance to name all their enemies as witches too, setting off an entire chain reaction of witchcraft accusations based on petty local grievances. Yes.

You kind of would, wouldn't you? You're just like, damn it, I'm going to the stake anyway. Yeah, never underestimate the otherworldly power of like village level grievances. Just fucking hating on your neighbors so much. Just like, yeah, you know what? I am a witch and so is that bitch over there. She didn't lend me butter last winter. Fuck her.

In the villages of Ordas and Siguramurdi, who jointly held 390 or so inhabitants, 158 had been accused of witchcraft. In another nearby town, Berra, so-called witches numbered a staggering 36.8% of the population. Well, at that point, just witchcraft is just the village trade. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if anything, you're the weirdo for not being a witch. Mm.

The situation was clearly spinning out of control and it was difficult to see how it could possibly resolve. And so Salazar decided to do something different to previous investigators sent by the Inquisition. He conducted separate experiments with a cross-section of the confessed witches to see if their accounts actually corroborated each other.

This was a not inconsiderable task. By this point, the number of people under suspicion was in the thousands. The mountainous terrain of the Navaran hills in which they all lived meant that travelling between villages and towns frequently took days on horseback. And what's more, the population all spoke a different language to Salazar, meaning as well as secretaries to help him craft reports, he needed a Basque translator wherever he went.

Here were the rules of the experiment that he designed. On different days and at different times, the persons concerned are to be taken to the witches' meeting place one by one. They are not to be told where they are going, and care must be taken that no one sees them, and the other person to be subjected to the experiment does not learn anything about it beforehand.

1. They are to indicate the exact place at which the witches gather and state the distance of this place from their homes. 2. They are to show the place where the devil sits, where they make sacrifice to him, and where they eat, dance, and take part in other activities. They are also to be questioned on the following details:

Number 5

whether they meet anyone on either the outward or homeward journey, and whether they speak to them or avoid them. Number six, how they re-enter their houses and at what time they usually go to the Sabbath and when they return. Number seven, whether there are clocks or bells in the neighborhood of the meeting place, where these are, and whether they hear them.

"Number eight: and they are to be questioned further on any other circumstances which might serve to clarify the problem and provide us with proof of these things." As it turned out, when the witches were subjected to rigorous questioning which didn't assume the fact of their guilt, several of their confessions appeared to have glaring holes. Salazar wrote up a report to be sent to his colleagues back in Logroño in which he made clear that he was less than impressed with what he had found.

For one thing, the witches had a weather problem. Some of them would recount attending Achillares on the 3rd of July, a night when Salazar recalled, "...the most violent and widespread storm in living memory broke out." When reminded of the bad weather that night, some would claim that they had attended the witches' meeting many miles away without ever getting wet.

while about 20 others said that they had been soaked through. Similarly, when asked if they had ever come across anyone else on their way to the Sabbath, several witches said that they had, but when these supposed witnesses were questioned, none could substantiate it. In fact, Salazar wrote, "...it is remarkable that in a village where everybody is on the watch for this event, they have never come across the witches, nor seen what happens among them. Even those in the same house or in the very chamber from which they depart remain in ignorance."

For until now I have never met with anyone who has seen what takes place. It is still more cause for wonder that neither have two accomplices leaving the same bed, felt the other getting out or coming back.

It seemed that nobody had really double-checked the fact of the witches' stories before. Two sisters, for instance, told Salazar in great detail about the acolari they had been to in a field the night before, where there had been, quote, a vast horde of witches taking part in endless dances and frolics near the cross which stands there. Salazar promptly travelled to the field to inspect the grass, as he dutifully wrote in his report.

The secretaries, friars, and everyone who accompanied me saw it to be fresh and untrampled without signs of anybody having been there. There's going to be a lot of quotes here, because this is one of those cases where I feel like the original document itself is actually funnier than anything I could come up with. For instance, you can just feel Salazar's withering contempt when he describes some of the witches confessing to trying to murder him. Others say that when I was in Zantestaban, they agreed at their aquilare to wreak vengeance upon me and my family, and that together...

With the devil, a troop of them came flying through the air, from a league and a half away to put this into effect. They entered the audience chamber at midday and were present in person during the hearings. More than 40 witches, men and women, came in there. On this point, the witnesses were all in accord.

Nonetheless, they became confused in the cross-examination, as so often happens, since the very effort to make such an extraordinary lie sound convincing confounds itself. For all of us happened to be present in the room, and this was so low, so small, and so narrow, that there was scarcely space left for any one person, let alone so many.

Others refer to a similar decision to kill me on the night of St. James. To carry this out, they entered my bedroom several times, so they maintained, and went on to describe how they poured their powders into my mouth as I lay asleep. Yet it is not surprising that I failed to feel anything since I apparently did not feel any ill effect from the other attempts. Not even when, as I presided the hearing in the chamber, the devil set fire to my person and to the chair on which I sat.

They hate me and they're making up... They hate me, they're going to kill me. Amazing elaborate stories of how they killed me. They're dribbling powders into my mouth. There was a similar difficulty in corroborating a story from a child witch who said that she had witnessed a separate attempt on Salazar's life. This is so stupid because it's like, it's the catch-22. It's like, you can't trust a witch unless it's about witch stuff.

In which case, trust them completely. It's like, yeah, there's a problem here. Isabel de Castro, a girl of 12 from San Sebastian, stated that she was present in the storm stirred up by the witches upon my arrival and that all the witches thronged around me in the air. On being cross-examined as to the persons who happened to be with me at that time and other such details she failed even to name. The mayors who were at my side, let alone anything else.

Yeah, I just find this so funny. He's just like, I feel like you can just feel how pissed off he is. He's just like ridden around on horseback for weeks and he's just like, these people are all fucking liars. I can't believe this. Yeah, strange. In some cases, the accused had provided ointments or potions that they said were magical substances they either anointed themselves with before the Sabbath or poisons they used on their enemies. Salazar had them tested to unimpressive effects.

Every one of the 22 pots produced in the course of the visitation have been revealed as false, faked, and fraudulent. They were only made by people who were forced to fabricate these things, employing means so devious and ridiculous that they would seem to merit nothing more than mockery and laughter.

The opinion of the doctors and apothecaries and the outcome of the experiments they have made in these matters point to the same conclusion, for after feeding the potions to numerous animals, they realized they were quite ineffectual in this sense, as the health of not a single animal was threatened nor did any suffer harm through these experiments. This conclusion was reinforced by the result of a more daring experiment in which a woman generally reputed to be a witch, according to the information of the children, was made to eat the potions in public.

She did this without feeling any ill effect nor being endangered. When pushed on the details, several people had told him that they had been bullied into confessing. Some had even been tortured. The trustworthiness of witnesses is further weakened by the force, inducement, and sinister methods used to extort their declarations, for they were imprisoned, molested, and violently threatened

One woman stated that they burnt her with a live coal, and while torturing her in this manner, they kept telling her that at that very moment, she was with the witches at their evil work. All this is enough to fill one with horror, making one realize how by these means the truth was inevitably distorted. Not only persons actually ill-treated perjured themselves, but also their neighbors, who...

on seeing such things, feared the same would happen to them, and with reason, especially when they saw that in this affair the village magistrates joined forces with a father, a husband, or a brother, and at other times with the clergy. They made them confess everything relating to the ointments, powders, and all the circumstances, until they had repeated, omitting nothing, all that the first child witches or witch-discovers had said at the outset.

All of this led Salazar to one conclusion. He had spent months travelling around the remote mountainsides of northern Spain, interrogating thousands of peasants and meticulously translating and writing down their confessions, and it had all been a colossal waste of time. As he complained in his report, After having duly studied the above with all the Christian attention of which I am capable,

And after having investigated all these matters both in the courtroom and outside, I have not found a single proof, not even the slightest indication, from which to infer that an act of witchcraft has actually taken place. Even if there were witches in the area, Salazar reasoned, and there surely were in some small number, the investigation had been totally contaminated from the start.

There was simply no way of discovering the truth with all the bullying, violence, recriminations and counter-recriminations that had gone on. All that could be done was to set up a robust series of rules and tests on what the Inquisition should do in future cases of witchcraft accusations, ensuring they never squandered so much of their precious time and resources again.

Interestingly, it seems that La Suprema, the head office, actually agreed. In 1614, they produced new instructions heavily based on Salazar's suggestions on how to sensibly, responsibly conduct a witch hunt. So basically, he was doing like the Department of Government Efficiency, but for inquisition?

And witch hunting? He's like, no, no, no, there are witches, obviously, but we're just going about it all wrong. No, I mean, yeah, he does really actually make that literal argument because his colleagues back in Legro really don't agree with him. They really think that there are witches and that they're real. They're kind of writing him all of these bitchy letters as well. And at one point he's like, look, you don't need to convince me that witches exist. I obviously know that witches exist. What I'm saying is there aren't any here. That's awesome. Yeah.

Some of these new rules included things like checking to see if the children, cattle or crops that the witches confessed to killing had actually died, which frankly feels crazy that it wasn't a requirement before. Yeah. If there had been verified deaths, then witchcraft investigators were to consider whether there were any other plausible explanations. At all times, the Inquisition was instructed to be accustomed

The inquisitors are to instruct the commissioners and the priests to explain to the people that damage to crops is sometimes the way God punishes us for our sins and sometimes is a natural consequence of bad weather. So I love this. Sometimes God happens, sometimes weather, okay? Yeah. God, the relationship between God and the weather, we haven't even figured that out yet, okay? But let's not blame everything on witches. Yeah.

These things occur everywhere, whether there are witches or not, and it is therefore most undesirable for people to believe that witches are always to blame. Threats and coercion in obtaining confessions was strictly prohibited. If someone had made a confession before the Inquisition got involved, it was to be carefully determined and noted whether they had done so under violence or the threat of it. Finding tangible corroborating evidence for any so-called witch's claim was an

absolute priority, and perhaps most importantly of all, no person is to be imprisoned or sentenced solely on the basis of the witch's denunciations. If the witches in their confessions testify against others, the evidence is to be tested by means of investigations as stipulated in these instructions, and only after these have provided confirmation may proceedings be initiated. Yeah, so it's safe. It's like, don't just trust the witches.

About what happened because those are the ones that are supposedly evil and in the thrall of Satan. Why wouldn't they lie to you? It's such a funny loophole in the Inquisition. Also, I like the idea. It's like, listen, the problem with torture is that it gives us false positives. God damn it. Yeah, that's completely it. Maybe Dick Cheney needs to hear some of this stuff.

The impact of these rules cannot be understated. What they essentially set in stone for the Inquisition was that in every future witchcraft investigation they undertook going forward, simply saying that woman bewitched me would not be enough to condemn someone to the stake, nor would even tend denunciations from fellow accused witches who swore they had seen her at the Sabbath performing spells or fornicating with the devil.

What was needed was cold, hard proof, which was pretty difficult to come by given the simple fact that witches are not actually real. We can't just listen to any old guy who came in his pants in the night and then woke up and said, wait a second, I think I saw my neighbor fuck the devil or whatever. Ha ha.

The result of this was that as a huge wave of witch hunting carried on across Europe and consequently North America over the next century, Spain and her colonies in the New World remained curiously low on witch burnings. This wasn't for lack of trying, witch trials still continued in great numbers, while the vast majority of the population and indeed the inquisitors themselves firmly believed that witches deserved capital punishment. But the standards of evidence to get to that point had simply been set far too high.

The man responsible for all of this, Alonso de Salazar Frias, died in 1635 and soon faded into obscurity. It was only when the Inquisition archives were made available for research in the 19th century that Henry Charles Lee, an American historian, discovered who was responsible for the Spanish Inquisition's curious change of heart.

honestly god bless him for kind of holding him back just a little bit yeah he tempered their insanity slightly yeah i kind of have to agree like julian was saying earlier the funniest thing about all this is that the guys who are doing the most murdering are like society's biggest losers like like you said they're like nothing in their pants at night they're like i had a

bad they're like i had a bad dream or like oh my dick don't work and then here they are they're pointing fingers they're getting people burnt at the stake like yeah cow cow don't work dick don't work last night i talked about my neighbor don't work can't make it right yeah neighbor but neighbor uh yeah borrowed a borrowed a broom uh two fortnights ago never returned it it's just like

I'm glad the incels of this generation haven't been given nearly as much power just by pointing. Mm.

Yeah, they have to just slide into some DMs and be like, kill yourself, you whore. Yeah, a little bit of extra work. They can't just be like, excuse me, Mr. Mayor, let's burn this bitch. And maybe that's why they're so mad. Yeah, they used to, you know, it's like, tell them, hey, go back, be a Spanish guy in the Inquisition and, you know, you can post as many groipers as you want.

I find Alonso de Salazar Frias' story inspiring because it's a story of someone standing up for what they believe contrary to our understanding of their role, not just a 17th century Catholic priest but a literal member of the Spanish Inquisition. Having said that he wasn't the only one, Marian Gibson told me about another priest, this time in England some 30 years later, who took on Matthew Hopkins, the infamous Witchfinder General. Joel Gould is a vicar

in the English countryside in the county of Huntingdon, which is now in Cambridgeshire. And he's really interesting to history because you would, again, expect him to be a witch hunter. He's a clergyman. He's a member of the established church. You would imagine he would be thinking, oh, there might be heretics in my community or there might be witches in my community. And we're not sure what he thought before a witch hunter came to his village. But once the witch hunter, Matthew Hopkins, is...

coming to see him, he becomes very agitated by that. And he writes a book against him. He argues that Hopkins has made a mistake in thinking that witches are as widespread as Hopkins says they are. You know, by the time that witch hunt is over, Hopkins and his associates have tried to

around 200 people. And he says that he doesn't believe that this is the case. And if it is the case, then he doesn't believe the people in his village, who he knows, could possibly be witches. He says that Hopkins is doing it for the glory and the money.

And he prints a letter, the only letter that we have from Matthew Hopkins. He prints a letter in his book, which actually shows Hopkins as a really rather nasty, vicious man, a really rather petty individual. So he offers this kind of character assassination of him, which has worked quite well in the course of history. And he does manage to warn Hopkins away. He does manage to slow down and ultimately to stop the witch hunting in Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire and sort of eastern England.

in the 1640s. So it feels like he's one of those people who wasn't able to make an enormous difference, but was able cumulatively to help stop something terrible happening. You know, if he hadn't spoken up, if he hadn't had the

the guts to do that, things would have been worse. And whilst you may think he should be on the side of the witch hunters, he's actually on the side of the witches. He's another witch's advocate, if you like. Yeah, those fake inquisitors doing it for the cash and the clout. All they want to do is secure that damn bag.

But more than these just being heartwarming little anecdotes which can get overlooked in the overarching horror of witch trials, the stories of these witches advocates are also warnings from history. They tell us that what we perceive as our modern state of freedom from dark and dangerous superstition isn't a phenomenon that naturally occurs as we grow more scientifically enlightened, but something that people have had to fight for, even when it meant putting themselves at risk.

If you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, you probably don't need me to sell you on the idea that general belief in ideas we might think of as irrational or superstitious can go up as well as down.

In particular, the right wing seems to be going through a degree of re-enchantment right now. I'm often struck by how figures on the far right and manosphere, many of whom started out as proudly secular, have begun to reach for the language of demonology to describe their enemies. I've even seen a couple of fairly popular Tradwife accounts stating confidently to their audiences that witches are real and are all working in public schools and daycares.

Marion and I have very different research specialisms, but one thing we bonded over when we talked was the feeling that it's never good news for the world when your chosen topic of interest becomes relevant. Ah, yes. When I started out researching witchcraft and magic in the 1990s, they seemed a lot less relevant.

I thought, well, this is just history. This is something we've consigned to the past. But over the last 10 years particularly, I've started to see them as increasingly relevant. You know, we hear the word witch a lot more in society. And it's possible really easily to find online witches.

and in print, people arguing that they really are witches, that something really ought to be done about them. And using all these old ideas of demonology to offer up these astonishing stories of people sacrificing babies and drinking blood and worshipping the devil. I never thought I would see that. I'm...

I've been astonished and appalled by it. And I think we do need to look back at the witch trials of the past and learn from them. Not just that it's possible for people to think these things and to spread them widely as conspiracy theories, but actually it is possible to resist them as well. It is possible to stand against them. I also think new technology is really important.

in spreading such conspiracy theories in the 16th and 17th centuries. It's print. So, you know, they have the new print technology. People aren't communicating in handwritten manuscripts anymore. They've got printing presses. And so they can churn out books about witches and magic and how the world is full of witches and how we should do something about it.

And there's a big boom in the publishing of demonologies. And I think we've seen exactly the same thing, really sadly, with the internet. I do think it's possible that we will see a resurgence of witch hunting in contemporary life. And it's already happened.

in southern Africa, in Indonesia, parts of India, you know, people are being persecuted as witches and killed in really large numbers. So you have hundreds of people being accused. Some of them are murdered. Some of them are exiled from their villages. And

and sent away. It's already happened. And that's happened since the 1990s. That's something that's taken off. You get accusations of child witches, just as you did in the past. You get accusations of women, primarily, just as you did in the past. But also other people too, marginal people in communities, poor people, elderly men. And

It just feels like we're going through a period of human history where we're repeating the mistakes of what we've previously thought of the period of the witch trials. And we're now in a new period of witch trials, which is deeply depressing as a historian, because one of the things you hope is that people are going to learn from the past. Hmm. This Gibson person seems remarkably competent. Someone should look into how she acquired those powers. Yeah.

Despite living in what was once optimistically called the Information Age, it sometimes feels as if we're living in something more like a counter-enlightenment. If we are bringing back witch hunts, then it's incumbent on all of us to be just as annoying and stubborn as Alonso de Salazar Frias' colleagues no doubt found him. And we, of course, have a weapon that he could only ever have dreamed of as he made all those gruelling journeys by horseback across the foothills of the Pyrenees. We have podcasts.

So true. And let's not hunt podcasters as if our powers of broadcasting are somehow supernatural. Let's let them, as they say, cook. But.

But not in that way. Not in that way. There's no eyes in the... There's no frog skin or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not, yeah. No boil, boil, toil and trouble. No steaks. No cooking. No cooking like that. Just mentally. Mentally cooking content.

I feel pretty fucking mentally cooked. Thank you, Annie, for this. Great stuff as usual. Fascinating. Well, what can I say? After exposing so many witches, we're all tuckered out. I guess it's time to wrap our little bodies around the base of our Christmas trees, except for Jake. He's not allowed to, but I guess you could- Wait, no, I can. I've got one. No, you're not allowed to do that, actually, technically. Wait a minute. No, you're going to have to- But I like Christmas. You have to use that little candle thing with the-

the little stems. I think you're going to find a little toad in a nice little outfit under your tree. A little toad yelling at you and threatening to tell the devil. I'll have a cool toad and you're going to have a bunch of coal. And Travis is the devil. Travis is some form of young Santa Claus based on his beard and beautiful hair.

Oh, thank you, listener, for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. If you're not already a subscriber, do yourself a favor this Christmas. Give the gift to yourself and others of a premium subscription to the QAA podcast, which you can acquire at patreon.com slash QAA for just five bucks a month. You'll get access to a whole second episode for every normal one and a bunch of our series like the one we mentioned today, Man Clan, The Time.

Annie and I did. Annie, is there anything you'd like to plug this Christmas Eve? I'm assuming it'll be around then when we put this out. No,

Nothing to plug except I'm on Blue Sky now, so you can come follow me there if you're not already. We lost another one, folks. Yeah, I'm just sick of it. Sorry. It's just really nice not having AI chatbots spamming up all of my replies and or Nazis. Yeah. We need to look into these pussy and bio witches. Travis, you got anything to plug? No.

Once again, I will plug going outside to getting some sunshine on your face. It's a wonderful experience. I try to do it daily. I don't always succeed, but it's something you should do. For everyone who isn't in California, that just means looking down at the snow and hoping the reflection of the small amount of sunlight coming through the clouds might burn the underside of you. All right. That is it for us this week. Jake.

Since you're back from your Caribbean voyage and you were almost swept away to sea, will you bless our listeners? Listeners, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. The spirit world is real to me. I think that there's a battle versus good versus evil going on. I think after the

the second assassination attempt when you watched his head move to me it seemed like he was protected there was a reason he was alive he could have easily been dead right now we wouldn't be having this conversation think the world would be a different place it's really interesting stuff that witches would want to get Kamala elected these are not my type of witches I think there's there's got to be some good witches out there who are on the opposite side are there any good witches Robbie always looks for his witches on tinder you could believe in

like the spirit world without believing in every type of spirit. Like, for instance, you could believe you could be Christian and you could believe in angels and you could believe in demons without having to necessarily believe that witches exist. So I don't... Well, I know some witches. Well, I know Zena the Witcher. They cast spells. I'm in the spiritual community in LA. Does your friend Zena cast spells? Uh,

I think she thinks she does. Yeah, I believe she thinks she does. What kind of spells does she cast? They would be pro-Trump spells if they're political at all. She's definitely pro-Trump. But yeah, and anti-Jew. But she loves this Jew. I'm not into witchcraft. I'm anti-witchcraft, but I've met...

witches and I've met people who've told me it's they claim that if they do something good it's okay if they do something bad like the karma comes back to them I don't know what is true or what isn't but I don't think you can just cast spells and wish harm upon someone and not have something bad come back to you if you know you're into that kind of stuff um

I mean, like, if anything, you're more of like a biblical sense of spirituality, like where I believe maybe demons exist and you could be possessed somehow or you can have like evil around you. But I don't think that people can like declare themselves like a witch or like there's that religious. What is that religious group? The Wiccans? There's a lot of witches out there.

And they're witches. There's not in your circle, but there are a lot because I'm, they're not my, I mean, I just have met some over the years. And you believe them? Like they can cast a spell? They've been very confident when they've told me. I don't know. Do they ride broomsticks? I'm not, I'm not for it. If they say Avada Kedavra, are you gone? Like,

Can they do a guardian when Nosa? Like, I don't... Like, do they have wands? There are people into voodoo. There are people into witchcraft. There's people doing all kinds of weird stuff around the world. If you're not in that circle, then maybe you weren't exposed to it. I'm not... I don't want to be exposed to it. It's not something I resonate with. I like...

really positive energy and love and light I like angels angels are protecting me I love angels but uh witchcraft's not my thing and I just think that but there are people doing it as we see in the story right I think there's people who believe that they're doing it you don't think that they that anyone there's there's any they identify as witches after switching from furries right exactly exactly they like playing make believe there's a whole movement on TikTok of people who believe that

like they go to sleep and they wake up and then they talk about, oh my God, I was actually at Hogwarts for eight years and I had like a time portal. That's a dream. People believe that though. They genuinely, and then there's like a whole community on TikTok of people talking about how they were a witch at Hogwarts for eight years and when they awoke, like they came back to this realm. I mean, I met a person who claimed to be a breatharian who says they don't eat or drink. So I think there's people that think they can do anything out in the world. Those guys speak off snacks in the bathroom when no one's paying attention. I agree.

The girl did come clean with me later that she was drinking juice.