An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Torture used on witches

The above entry in this book is one that the writer has approached with reluctance. Were I to tell the full and detailed story of how the supposed followers of the Christian God of Love have smeared their bloodstained hands over the pages of human history, I would be accused of anti-Christian prejudice. Yet every detail of such an accusation could be supported by documentary evidence, in sickening abundance. Its cumulative effect would be to prove that Christianity has inflicted far more martyrdoms than paganism ever did.

Such documentation has been admirably done, sometimes with photographed copies of the originals, by Rossell Hope Robbins, in his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1959). This book is surely one of the most damning indictments of the Christian Church ever penned; the more so as it is not written for any such purpose but simply as an historical review of the facts.

I disagree with Mr Hope Robbins’ opinion of witchcraft itself; but his contribution to the history of this subject is of prime importance.

The origin of torture and execution in the name of religion is the certainty that your religion is true, and therefore any other religion must be false. This being so, you must regard people who profess a different religion from your own as heretics, and as inevitably damned (as Saint Augustine did). It is your religious duty to persecute them; and because their crime is against God, no cruelty is too great to use towards them. Indeed, anyone who urges mercy towards heretics is suspect himself. The evidence of history shows overwhelmingly that witches were persecuted, not because they had done harm, but because their crime was heresy. Hence the heavy involvement, from the beginning, of the Church in witchcraft trials.

The extirpation of witchcraft was a religious duty. So we read of a witch being flogged to the sound of bells ringing the Angelus; of the torture chamber being censed with Church incense, and the instruments of torture blessed, before the proceedings commenced. We find documents, recording questions put to a woman under torture, which are headed with the letters “A.M.D.G.”, Ad majorem Dei gloriam, “To the greater glory of God”.

Nor were the Protestants any less cruel and fanatical than the Catholics. In fact, some of the most abominable stories come from the Protestant countries, particularly Scotland. The laws of Scotland with regard to witchcraft were different from those of England. Under Scottish law, torture was legal; under English law, after the Reformation, it was not.

Consequently, we may read such stories as that recorded of the trial of Alison Balfour, in Scotland in 1596. A confession of witchcraft was extorted from this woman by means of the ’boots’, the ’claspie-claws’, and the ’pilnie-winks’. These were instruments of torture for causing agony to the legs, the arms, and the fingers, respectively; and could be applied with such violence that the blood spurted from the limbs.

Before Alison Balfour confessed what was required of her, she was put in the claspie-claws and kept so for forty-eight hours. Not content with this, the pious and God-fearing agents of the Kirk put her husband into heavy irons, and tortured her son with the boots; and as a final touch they took her daughter, a little girl of 7, and screwed the child’s fingers into the pilnie-winks, in the mother’s presence. At this juncture, Alison Balfour confessed; and upon the strength of this confession she was subsequently executed.

No mercy was shown, by either Protestant or Catholic, to children, if they were involved in witchcraft. That godly Puritan, Cotton Mather, in his account of the witchcraft trial at Mohra, in Sweden, in 1669, tells us with the utmost complacency how, after a good deal of praying, preaching and psalm-singing, “Fifteen children which likewise confessed that they were engaged in this witchery, died as the rest”; that is, by burning at the stake.

At other times, children of witch families were sentenced to be flogged while their relatives burned. The witch-hunter Nicholas Remy recorded this fact with regret; he felt that the children should have been burned as well.

The sentences of death in Scotland were sometimes carried out in a particularly horrible manner, and a relic of this survives today. It is the Witches’ Stone, near Forres, in Moray, Scotland. Beside the stone is an inscription, which says: “From Clust Hill witches were rolled in stout barrels through which knives were driven. When the barrels stopped they were burned with their mangled contents. This stone marks the site of one such burning”.

That this method of execution was carried out elsewhere in Scotland also, is attested by two Scottish writers, J. Mitchell and John Dickie, who published their book The Philosophy of Witchcraft in Paisley, Scotland, in 1839. They tell us:

There is a hill in Perthshire which bears the name of the Witches’ Crag to this day, and tradition still tells how it acquired the appellation. An old woman, who had been found guilty of Witchcraft, was taken to the top of it, and there put into a barrel, the sides and ends of which were stuck full of sharp-pointed nails. The barrel was then fitted up tightly, and suffered to roll down the steep declivity amid the rejoicings of the infuriated demons who had gathered together to witness the poor old woman’s tortures!! Where the barrel rested a bonfire was kindled, and it, and all that it contained, were consumed to ashes.

By “infuriated demons”, the authors mean, not evil spirits, but the witch-hunters and those who supported them, who had gathered together to enjoy the fun. Indeed, though they regarded themselves as acting from the highest and most religious motives, it seems that it was quite usual for the magistrates of a Scottish town to hold a public dinner after a witch-burning, as a form of celebration. There is a record of this being done at Paisley, in 1697, after seven people had been burned there as witches, in the presence of a vast crowd that had gathered to witness the scene.

It was on the Continent of Europe, however, and particularly in Germany, that the horrors of torture and cruelty raged most fiercely. Indeed, torture seems sometimes to have been indulged in for its own sake, even when the person had already confessed. The justification for this was, that a confession could not be fully true unless it was made under torture.

There were several degrees of torture practised in Germany in the seventeenth century, the blackest period of the whole history of witchcraft persecution. The first degree was called preparatory torture. It began with taking the prisoner to the torture chamber, and showing her the instruments, explaining in detail the particular agonies that each could inflict. Then the prisoner was stripped and made ready. Women prisoners were supposed to be stripped by respectable matrons; but in practice they were roughly handled and sometimes raped by the torturer’s assistants.

Then some preliminary taste of torture was inflicted on them, such as whipping, or an application of the thumb-screws. This preparatory examination was not officially reckoned as torture; so those who confessed anything under it were stated in the court records to have confessed voluntarily, without torture.

If, however, the prisoner did not confess, the jailers proceeded to the final torture. This was not supposed to be repeated more than three times; but again in practice there were no safeguards for the prisoner, and the tortures could be varied at will by the sadistic ingenuity of witch-judges. One of the worst of these was Judge Heinrich von Schultheis, who is recorded to have cut open a woman’s feet and poured boiling oil into the wounds. He wrote a book of instructions on how to proceed in witch trials, which was printed with the approbation of the Prince-Archbishop of Mainz. In this frightful volume, Schultheis declares that torture is a work pleasing in God’s sight, because by means of it witches are brought to confession. It is therefore good, both for the torturer and the one who is tortured.

A portrait of this monster has survived to us. It shows a handsomely-dressed gentleman, plump and well-groomed, with the wide lace-trimmed collar and neat beard and moustache that were worn at that period. Only the closely-set eyes betray the gloating cruelty of the sadistic killer; but this they do so completely that one cannot look at the face without a shudder. It may well be that his successors realised what Schultheis was; because only one copy of his book is known to exist, and that is in Cornell University Library. A book seldom disappears as completely as that, unless copies of it have been deliberately destroyed.

The final torture, therefore, had innumerable means of inflicting agony upon the human flesh—the thumb-screws, the rack, the rawhide whip, the iron chair (which was heated while the prisoner was held fastened in it), spiked metal chains which were tightened around the forehead, and so on. But the favourite method was that known as the strappado, from the Latin strappare, to pull. This was a means of dislocating the prisoner’s limbs, especially the shoulders. The victim’s hands were tied behind his back, and fastened to a rope with a pulley. Then, with a sudden pull, he was hoisted into the air. While he hung thus, heavy weights were tied to his feet to increase the pain.

While the prisoner was thus hanging, they were interrogated with questions, and the results written down as a ’confession’. If they subsequently tried to deny or retract anything, they were tortured again. Sometimes they were tortured again, in any case, with particular severity, in order to force them to name ’accomplices’. Names were suggested to them, of persons the authorities wished to implicate. By this means, more and more people could be drawn into the net of the witch-hunters.

For this purpose, a particularly agonising torture, known as squassation, was often employed. It was a further development of the strappado. The victim was hoisted in the same way, and kept hanging, with weights attached to the feet; but his body was then suddenly and violently dropped, nearly but not quite to the ground. The effect of this was to dislocate every joint of the body. Under this form of torture, prisoners sometimes collapsed and died. It was then given out that “The Devil had strangled them, to stop them revealing too much”, or some such story. They were regarded as guilty, and their bodies burned.

The worst period at Bamberg was under the rule of Prince-Bishop Gottfried Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim, who came to be known as the Witch-Bishop. His reign lasted from 1623 to 1633, and in it he burned at least 600 people as witches. His cousin, the Prince-Bishop of Wurzberg, burned 900 alleged witches during his reign; but Bamberg became the more notorious, as being the very home of torture of the most atrocious kind.

Of particular interest is the Hexenhaus, or special prison for witches, that was built at Bamberg in 1627 by order of the Witch-Bishop. The building no longer exists, having been destroyed when witch-hunting went out of fashion and the Bishop’s successors became ashamed of it. In its day, however, it was considered a very handsome edifice, and a plan and picture of it remain. Besides two chapels and a torture-chamber, it had accommodation for the imprisonment, in separate cells, of twenty-six witches—two covens. On the front of the Hexenhaus were two stone tablets, bearing versions in Latin and German of a significant text from I Kings, Chap. IX, vs. 7, 8, and 9: “This house . . . shall be ... a byword. Everyone that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss, and they shall say, Why hath the Lord done this unto this land, and to this house? And they shall answer, Because they forsook the Lord their God . . . and have taken hold upon other gods, and have worshipped them, and served them; therefore hath the Lord brought upon them all this evil.”

This seems clearly to indicate that the witches were accused of having their own gods, instead of the Christian God.

Eventually, the reign of terror in Bamberg grew so scandalous that the Emperor himself took firm action to stop it. He was urged there-to by his Jesuit confessor, Father Lamormaini; a fact that should be recorded, to show that not all Christian priests approved of the proceedings against witches. Another Jesuit who spoke out against the torture of witches, with the utmost bravery, was Father Friedrich Von Spee, whose book Cautio Criminalis was published in Rinteln in 1631. He was imprisoned and disgraced for his boldness, and was probably lucky to escape execution.

From the worst of these manifestations of cruelty, England was mercifully free; mainly because English law is fundamentally different from Continental law, in that here the onus is on the prosecution to prove guilt, rather than on the prisoner to prove innocence, and that torture was not officially permitted. Such torture as did take place in England was unofficial and outside the law. It was administered by such rogues as Matthew Hopkins the notorious Witch-Finder General (See HOPKINS, MATTHEW), who found means to torment prisoners while still keeping within the letter of the law.

However, an influential Puritan divine, William Perkins, wrote in approval of subjecting witches to torture, in his Discourse of Witchcraft, published in Cambridge in 1608. Perkins says of torture that it might “no doubt lawfully and with good conscience be used, howbeit not in every case, but only upon strong and great presumptions going before, and when the party is obstinate”.

Sometimes such pious sentiments were unofficially acted upon. In 1603, at Catton in Suffolk, a mob got together to torture an 80-year-old woman Agnes Fenn, who was accused of witchcraft. She was punched with the handles of daggers, tossed up into the air, and terrorised by having a flash of gunpowder exploded in her face. Then someone prepared a rough instrument of torture almost worthy of Bamberg.

This consisted of a stool, through which sharp daggers and knives had been stuck, with the points protruding upwards. Then, says a contemporary account, “they often times struck her down upon the same stool whereby she was sore pricked and grievously hurt”.