Hunting Witches in Print, Part One - “Oh, no, not SPAIN again?!”
1 December 2006 by Eve
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
2 December 2006, on 2:04 am
Evilevilevilevilevilevilevil….Thanks, Eve! I really enjoy this stuff, and I wouldn’t usually be able to get far in the books about it. It’s nice to get it in bite size chunks.
2 December 2006, on 10:24 am
The Spanish Inquisition murdered their last victim as recently as 1852? He was a Xian who believed in a churchless religion and was executed for heresy. (Wikipedia I believe)
2 December 2006, on 10:33 am
Thanks, Eve. You know I enjoy these posts of yours very much! Both Ramon Llull and King Peter IV “The Ceremonious” have streets named after them close to the home where I grew up.
One of my high-school Spanish history teachers used to complain that the Spanish Inquisition has the bad reputation, but that other European Inquisitions were much worse. I am awaiting part 2 to see whether you agree with that.
2 December 2006, on 11:53 am
“When in 1476 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.”
Do you mean “1376″or did I miss something in the 104 year date jump? Great stuff though - I have really enjoyed reading these history lessons. Do you have plans to publish all of them in one place?
2 December 2006, on 12:50 pm
No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition…oh, wait, this is Eve we’re talking about. Okay, we do, we do expect the Spanish Inquisition! I wonder how many of those suspected brujas/brujos in Espana were actually just victims of the village baker? And, will this trek skip across the pond to Massachusetts, by chance?
In terms of Hammer books, I prefer Malleus Deum;
“The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying:
Valhalla, I am coming!
On we sweep with threshing oar,
Our only goal will be the western shore…”
2 December 2006, on 3:09 pm
Great stuff, Eve.
It’s always good to be reminded of the atrocities carried out in the name of some god or other.
As T.H. Huxley famously said, “I verily believe that the great good which has been effected in the world by Christianity has been largely counteracted by the pestilent doctrine on which all the Churches have insisted, that honest disbelief in their more or less astonishing creeds is a moral offence, indeed a sin of the deepest dye, deserving and involving the same future retribution as murder and robbery. If we could only see, in one view, the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the lies, the slaughter, the violations of every obligation of humanity, which have flowed from this source along the course of the history of Christian nations, our worst imaginations of Hell would pale beside the vision.” (emboldening mine) ‘Collected Essays: Agnosticism’ 1889.
2 December 2006, on 7:03 pm
Modern pagans call the Inquisition the “Burning Times.” They’ve even appropriated the phrase “Never again” from the Holocaust (thereby turning the Inquisition into a pagan holocaust). Even though most of the people killed during the Inquisition were Christians and not pagans, modern pagans believe themselves to be their religious descendants. They also carry a grudge against Christianity for this, seeing it as one of the great persecutions against pagans.
2 December 2006, on 7:21 pm
I used to be a pagan. Of course, I like any religion where girls dance naked around bonfires to the accompaniment of white guys playing “jungle” drums- okay I could do without the white guys. When I could drag my attention away from the writhing fire-bronzed flesh circling before me, I’d figure out the underlying rhythm of the current drumming and, with a few judiciously placed strikes to a borrowed djembe, disrupt the whole circle like a stick through a bicycle spokes. I didn’t say I was a good pagan.
I didn’t really, um, converse with the pagan girls I knew about such things but I suspect they never thought that deeply about it. Plus, as Chayanov says, most of those “witches” burnt were more likely despised neighbors, the mentally ill, or the inadvertently drugged.
2 December 2006, on 7:30 pm
I’m not pagan but I’ve been to pagan gatherings. I’ve also disrupted drum circles and dancing by changing the tempo of the rhythm — great fun. I’ve also been to various “pagan pride days” where they always have a display dedicated to the Burning Times. The display usually includes a list of victims’ names (but not their religious backgrounds). I think you’re right, that most of the time most of them really don’t think about it, but when they do, they can get pretty self-righteous about it. Anytime they feel they’re being oppressed by society, out comes the Buring Times.
2 December 2006, on 8:28 pm
Aaah, the Burning Times…
That takes me back.
I mean, that takes me Aback. It is behavior akin to the Holocaust, where a “divine” authority commits horrifying atrocities under the guise of a religion supposedly based on “love”.
That is some fucked-up crazy tough love.
Like “The Greatest Story Ever Told” directed by Takashi Miike and produced by the BTK killer.
But, y’know, WORSE.
Eve, this continuing series is fantastic stuff. This is the kind of crucial, gory detail that I can guarantee students of religious history ain’t gonna hear about in a US classroom.
Thank you.
2 December 2006, on 10:26 pm
Well, I am a pagan, but I don’t make any claim on the so-called “Burning Times.” That was NOT about oppressing and persecuting pagans, it was about oppressing and persecuting women, mainly so the Church could swipe their land and holdings from them. In other words, it was all about the money.
When I think of the phrase “Never again,” I whisper a desperate plea to the collective conscience and think of the Bush Administration.
3 December 2006, on 12:00 pm
Zipi:
One of my high-school Spanish history teachers used to complain that the Spanish Inquisition has the bad reputation, but that other European Inquisitions were much worse. I am awaiting part 2 to see whether you agree with that.
Actually, the Black Legend had something to do w/the Spanish Inquisition’s claim to notoreity.
http://www.answers.com/topic/the-inquisition-myth
The Goan Inquisiton actually made the Spanish one look relatively mild in comparison:
http://biblioblography.blogspot.com/2006/12/thou-shalt-have-no-other-gods-before.html
3 December 2006, on 1:40 pm
Hmmm…Inquisition…Witches…Potions…’Black Sabbath’…
This may be waaay offbeat…or maybe not, considering the latter. [Will this comment, successfully, sneak in, unnoticed, under the radar?]
Anyway…
Ozzy Osborne and I add another digit to our age tally today. So, astrologically, as ‘Sagittarians’, what do we have in common? Hmmm…We’re both musicians; albeit quite different in style…”Roit”! What’s that you say?…we’re both…nuts? Ok, I’ll grant you that. We most probably both would have been burned at the stake, in Inquisitional times. Correct! Of course, he’s nine years younger. “Oh Reilly?”
Sooooo…um…not much else. I was thinking, however…
Should I contact him for a loan?
3 December 2006, on 9:57 pm
RDZ wrote:
Good old Led Zepellin II.
4 December 2006, on 6:24 am
Eve,
Forgive me for being off-topic, but I’m posting this here as I’d like you to see it.
We spoke briefly on another thread about CBT (and I recommended a self-help book on the subject to you and Matt - and anyone else who was interested). You expressed some interest in it, but now I have found something else which may interest you - a totally free genuine CBT online course which is run by Glasgow University and the Scottish Executive Health Department.
The course is called ‘Living Life To The Full’ and has been written by Dr Chris Williams, a Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at the University of Glasgow. His main clinical and research interest is in the area of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and in particular in looking at ways of disseminating this approach more widely. He has developed written and computer-based self-help treatments for anxiety, depression and bulimia and is a well-known CBT trainer and teacher.
The course can be accessed here , and hope that you may find it useful.
4 December 2006, on 7:37 pm
Glad you guys like this first installment; like the Crusades and Inquisition (both Spanish and not), there is tons of info out there on the witch hunts, and much of it not very reliable. I’ve noticed that people tend to notice and repeat the bits that sound the most sensationalistic without making sure they’re actual facts supported by the evidence, so I try to be as careful as I can in what I actually write myself.
Russman, good eye! I did indeed mean “1376″ and fixed the typo.
Zipi, I agree that the Spanish version of the Inquisition receives most of the bad press, some of it undeserved, exaggerated, or simply invented; fortunately, it also was one of the most documented and minutely at that. Not only that, but unlike an unknown quantity of the witch hunt transcripts, which were most often secular and rural, a great amount of the Spanish Inquisition’s documentation has survived for us to consult, and that has helped expose much of the “Black Legend” as more myth than reality (thanks, KA).
Chayanov, the pagans have latched onto the “Burning Times,” as many of them call the Great European Witch Hunts, as their own holocaust, but I agree with Lynda: much of it was mostly anti-feminist, not anti-pagan, and consisted of xian vs. xian. As Raindog adds, outbreaks of ergotism probably caused the symptoms of “curses,” “hexes,” “possessions,” and “spells” some people apparently manifested in some cases, and anyone markedly different from the norm, especially in small populations, has always made a handy-dandy scapegoat for those populations’ ills.
One interesting but possibly false nugget I found in descriptions of Eymerich’s book states that he based his descriptions of sorcerous rituals and spells on those he found in “books of magic” he confiscated from his victims. I haven’t found anything more specific than that in my research so far, so I decided not to include it in case it’s one of those historical “rumors” that end up being quoted as true simply due to unresearched repetition. Anything more I find out, I’ll share!
Many thanks for the referral, Old Git! I’m going to check the course out right away.
4 December 2006, on 8:23 pm
Eve,
Eymerich must have been familiar with the ‘Necronomicon’ of Abdul Alhazred, don’t you think?
LOL!
Hope you enjoy the course and find it useful.
4 December 2006, on 9:29 pm
OG, great minds really do think alike; I kept remembering the Necronomicon every time I read about the “magical texts” Nicky allegedly confiscated from his victims!
Thanks again…
5 December 2006, on 10:19 pm
Eve
Nicely researched. I’m sure we were never taught this in school.
I wonder if there is a current trend to start the blood letting again. We hear so much from the religious that I begin to worry that it wouldn’t take much of a push for them to light the fires again.
5 December 2006, on 11:09 pm
Thanks, jimmer.
I just read about the Jose Padilla torture case, and I suspect I’ll get little sleep tonight. How can we speedily impeach this president and bring as many of these criminals as we can to trial??!!
9 December 2006, on 8:10 pm
Oddly enough I had posted a bit about Eymerich myself, but with a slant referring to the use of torture in the war in Iraq…
(here).
I’d come accross stuff about him while researching something else - thanks for the great article anyway.
11 December 2006, on 9:01 pm
[...] Hunting Witches in Print, Part Two – “Can They REALLY Fly?” By Eve The Story Thus Far: In 1376 CE, Spanish Inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich published his Directorium Inquisitorum (“Inquisitors’ Manual”), the first comprehensive treatise on witch hunting in print (see Hunting Witches in Print, Part One – “Oh, No, Not SPAIN Again?!”)… [...]
11 December 2006, on 10:16 pm
Glad you found it useful, Leonard; I find the parallels between the Inquisitors’ rationalization of the use of torture and current parties’ justifications eerily similar, too.
17 January 2007, on 8:53 pm
[...] An evening trip to the local Wax Museum at my eight-year-old niece’s insistence strongly reminded me of GifS and the current series I’m behind on (I’ll have the next installment of Hunting Witches in Print up ASAP, I promise!). After recalling Zipi’s mention of a street named after Ramon Llull, a Catalan theologian and mystic harrassed by Dominican Inquisitor and Directorium Inquisitorum author Nicholas Eymerich, I actually found myself face to face with Llull’s wax counterpart in the medieval section. Previously, I had already located his street on a map of Barcelona, but his inclusion in the wax museum truly brought him more to life for me (no Eymerich figure, though). [...]