Many of you have probably heard of the book Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of the Witches”), a practical handbook on seeking out, identifying, testing, interrogating, and trying suspected witches written by Dominican Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and supposedly also Jacob Sprenger in 1487, which became arguably the primary bible for the Great European Witch Hunts.

Popular belief holds that the two authored the treatise after Pope Innocent VIII issued a decree on December 5, 1484 empowering them to prosecute witches, and submitted it to the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Theology on May 9, 1487. The story goes that when the theologians denounced it as illegal and unethical, Kramer and Sprenger forged their endorsement anyway and added it to the beginning of the Malleus. Still, actual historical facts tell a different tale – but more on that later.

For now, perhaps you haven’t heard of Nicolau Eymerich (also spelled “Aymerich” and “Eymeric” among other variants)…

Born in 1320 in the region of Catalonia, Spain, little Nicky entered the Dominican Order on August 4, 1334. In 1357, he became the head of the Aragon Inquisition, established back in 1232 by Pope Gregory IV and at that time the only Inquisition on Iberian soil. A year later he had become Chaplain to the Pope for his zeal in pursuing heretics and blasphemers, but he was also beginning to make powerful enemies (including King Peter IV of Aragon himself) as a result of that same zeal.

Besides interrogating Franciscan spiritualist Nicolas de Calabria (who apparently counted the King among his supporters) and accusing Barcelonan Jew Astruc Dapiera of sorcery, Nicky frequently had heretics’ tongues run through by nails to keep them from blaspheming. He also became the first Inquisitor to find a way around the Church’s directive to only torture a defendant once for an accusation by ordering a separate interrogation for each separate charge. Around 1359, he appears to have started writing a treatise on sorcery.

In 1362, protests against his election as Vicar General of the Dominicans of Aragon swayed Pope Urban V into invalidating that election and confirming a neutral party instead. Nicky’s enmity with Peter IV continued to increase with the former’s harassment of the followers of Ramon Llull, his continued although forbidden preaching in Barcelona, and his support of the diocese of Tarragona’s revolt against the King. When in 1476 1376 the governor of the area surrounded Nicky’s Dominican monastery hideout, the Inquisitor General of Aragon had to escape to the papal court of Gregory XI in Avignon, France.

While in exile, he set to work writing the Directorium Inquisitorum (”Inquisitors’ Manual”), following an already-established pattern in ecclesiastical manuscripts of defining witchcraft as a form of heresy. Drawing on the Bible and his previous writings as well as those of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, he divided witchcraft into three categories. The first, latria, he considered the worst because it involved offering up to demons the worship that should rightly go to God, including praying, making sacrifices, and lighting candles or incense.

The second, dulia or the veneration of saints, involved calling on the names of devils in litany for their intercession with God alongside those of angels or saints; he included the Muslims in this category because of what he called their heretical veneration of Muhammad. His third, the conjuration of demons, constituted the newest contribution to Inquisitorial literature because strangely enough, at the time even the Church didn’t consider consulting with demons necessarily sinful. He also emphasized psychological manipulation as an integral part of interrogating suspects along with physical torture, interestingly calling the latter “deceptive and ineffectual.”

Nicky later returned, was exiled again from, and returned a final time to Spain, where the Inquisition adopted and used his Directorium as its definitive manual into the 17th century. His epitaph reads in Latin, Praedicator veridicus, inquisitor intrepidus, doctor egregious (“truthful preacher, undaunted investigator, singular instructor”). Much more recently, he has even become the protagonist in a series of Italian speculative fiction novels (site in Italian)!

Interestingly enough, the case of the Holy Child of La Guardia notwithstanding, witch hunts in Spain never quite reached the frenzy they did in other countries such as France, England, and Germany. It seems somewhat ironic that the country most synonymous with the legendary terrors of the Inquisition, and that gave birth to the author of the first cohesive compilation of superstitions, objectionable practices, and methods of handling accused practitioners, fell behind in hunting witches. After the case of the witches of Zugarramurdi (site in Spanish) in 1610 – 1612, the Spanish Inquisition basically demoted witch hunting as a priority and shelved the Directorium (although you could argue that its continued persecution of heretics, including Protestants, constituted a form of witch hunt as well).

But the Spanish were not the only Inquisitors reading Eymerich’s book…

Next: Hunting Witches in Print, Part 2

I may have my atheist card- similar to a ghetto pass but without the street cred and/or the bling, revoked for this but…

I was watching Charlie Rose last night- usually just as noise in the background and, without cable, the only alternative to the circus that passes for local news around here. Morgan Freeman’s on. He’s very cool, interesting, whatever. Then, Charlie introduces Gary Wills as a Northwestern University professor, an historian, and, I interpreted, based on a short list of his published works, a christian apologist.

I must confess, I groaned and was about to either change the channel or just turn the thing off, but I was, fortunately, a little slow in acting.

Gary’s out promoting his new book, What Paul Meant(a review by Richard Wightman Fox at Slate). I haven’t yet read the book but I’ll summarize some of the nuggets that Gary revealed in the interview(you can jump it forward from the Morgan Freeman part);

First, the Saul/Paul thing wasn’t the result of a conversion but, rather, the convention of the day for Jews to have one Jewish name and one Pagan(Roman)- just as Peter was also Cephas or Simon bar Jonah.

Second, the whole Damascus Road, flash of light thingie? Not so much. Paul was a Jew, a Pharisee, who came, over time- and a supposed viewing of the risen christ, to embrace Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. The conversion scene was dreamed up by whoever authored the “Gospel of Luke” and “Acts of the Apostles”, written long after Paul’s death.

Third, the accusations of anti-semitism leveled at him by Augustine and Martin Luther- for example, are patently ridiculous because Paul wasn’t out to win folks to christianity but to convince his fellow Jews that Jesus was the one they’d been waiting for. Paul was born and died a Jew
Fourth, and I don’t have the specifics here, Paul actually wrote only seven of the thirteen letters attributed to him. The misogynistic claptrap occurs only in the six(eg., Timothy) he didn’t write.

Fifth, apparently, Paul not only referred to his female co-missionaries in the same manner he did his male colleagues, he stated that women could participate in- and prophesy at, religious gatherings. He recognized Junia as an apostle as well- though her name would come to be corrupted to “Junias” and she would be identified as male(Wills deals with the controversy concerning the masculine gender of the Greek in the texts where she appears by reminding us that there is no mention of a male “Junias” anywhere else in contemporaneous writings- i.e., Junias wasn’t a Roman name at all).

Sixth, in his only reference to homosexuality, Paul is in the midst of refereeing a dispute between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus and he’s making the technical point that neither side is without sin- like “You all(to the Gentiles) didn’t stone the prophets but you slept with other men and you all(to the Jews) didn’t sleep with other men but you stoned the prophets”. He’s using homosexuality as an example here(Corinthians) because it’s against Jewish Law. And why is it against Jewish Law? Because it breaks the Holiness Code- you know, no meat mixed with dairy, no different fibres woven into cloth, no two seeds in one field, no two men together sexually(where one- remember this is three thousand year old thinking, is playing the role of a woman). The breaking of that code results in one being unclean.

Here’s the kicker; both Jesus and Paul declared those antiquated Holiness Codes no longer relevant- Jesus, himself, said that we were not made unclean by what we touch or consume but, rather, by what was in our hearts and what came out of our mouths. In simpler terms, for Dani and Frank, you lose- even on a scriptural basis, the justification for your bigotry. As a matter of fact, to Jesus- and Paul, the whole of the Law and the Prophets was to “Love god with your entire being and to love your neighbor as yourself” period. No more, no less. I’ll settle for one out of two.
Finally, Wills is still a Jesus apologist- if not one for the church itself, claiming as his evidence that Paul and 500 others supposedly saw the risen Jesus, so it must be true, and that we can’t scientifically prove he didn’t rise- remember extraordinary claims/proof? Obviously, he doesn’t have all his rational ducks in a row. But he believes that reason must play a part in faith and that’s a step in the right direction. He’s anti-Bush, pro-choice, pro-embryonic stemcell, pro-homosexual, pretty much anathema to the Dani’s and the Robert O’Brien’s of the world. And I can live with that.