The Secret Doctrine

[The following is Episode 8 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

For three days and three nights, the old woman had been kept imprisoned in the cold, dark room, weakened from hunger, parched by thirst, and finding only fleeting relief from the pain that wracked her body during those brief moments when she drifted off to sleep.  But now she could hear the deafening echoes of footsteps, a warning that her tormentors were returning.  She knew that they would be bringing fresh accusations against her, and new methods of torture.  She thought that she was beyond fear, and beyond pain, and only suffered from a feeling of bitter loneliness, and despair.  The door to her tiny prison opened, and the three men entered, one of them wearing the collar of a priest.  He was the silent one, the one who studied her with cold, unfeeling eyes as his two companions barked at her with insults masked in high-sounding words: blasphemy, necromancy, sorcery.  She did not know which of her neighbors had brought these inquisitors upon her, or what stories they had told.  But the accusations rang in her ears.  Her evil eye had sickened children, killed cattle, rendered men impotent, and caused stillbirths.  She had been seen cavorting with the devil in nightly ceremonies, with people whose names were unfamiliar to her.  Her body, so her accusers said, bore the mark of the devil, and they proved it by sticking long pins into the mark, to prove that she felt no real pain.  But she could no longer feel pain.  Her thumbs had been crushed with screws in tiny vices, her arms pulled from their sockets after being tied behind her back as she was lifted from the ground, and her body had been stretched on the rack.  And still, after three days, she had not confessed.  But now hope had abandoned her.  As the sickening smell of hot sulfur filled her nostrils, the last bit of her resolve melted away.  She admitted that she had signed a pact with the devil, in blood, and had sacrificed infants as a demonstration of her loyalty.  At night, she had flown to distant cities, to celebrate infernal masses with other witches.  And she admitted that many of these were people known to her, and gave the inquisitors their names.  As she finished, she saw, for the very first time, a smile cross the lips of the silent priest.  The smell of sulfur subsided, and for the first time in three days she felt a sense of peace, in the midst of her despair.  As she followed her confession with a plea for forgiveness, she knew that she would be granted a humane death.  Her inquisitors would allow her to die before her body was committed to the flames.

            In the centuries following the age of King Arthur, Europe would undergo a series of transformations that would be as profound as they were cataclysmic.  From the ruins of the old Roman Empire, German warlords would build a new civilization.  Tribal chieftains evolved into noblemen, the most powerful of these, such as Charlemagne, would become kings, and from the kingdoms that they ruled emerged the countries that are familiar to us today: England, France, and Spain.  By the year 1000 AD, society was separated into three distinct groups, the priests and monks, who tended to be the only persons with a real education, the knights, and the peasants, who made up about 90% of the population.  These peasants were literally bound to the land on which they worked, and most lived on the edge of famine.  There was no economic life to speak of, trade was limited to essentials and a few luxury items for the nobility, and cities and towns were just beginning to emerge as centers of commerce.  By the twelfth century, improvements in farming techniques led to better nutrition, and many peasants were able to free themselves from the nobles to whom they had been bound.  It was this age that first saw the rise of the bourgeoisie, or middle class, and free labor.  Even the nobility underwent a sort of refinement, and both nobles and knights subscribed to the Arthurian ideal of courtly love.  The Church as well, which had often succumbed to corruption in the centuries after Constantine, underwent reforms initiated from both within and without.  New monastic orders were formed, practicing an austere version of Christianity that sought to restore the apostolic zeal of the original followers of Christ.  And local lords set about appointing pious abbots and priests to serve their subjects.  There were even attempts to reform the papacy itself, with mixed success.  It seemed that Europe was well on the road to restoring, or even surpassing, the civilization that it had replaced, but in the thirteenth century, its people would face a series of devastating setbacks.  Famine struck around the year 1290, brought on by climate changes that brought cold weather, torrential rains, early frosts, and soil exhaustion due to the improved farming techniques.  This time of troubles persisted for decades, and it’s estimated that from the two-year period between 1315 and 1317 alone, the population declined by as much as 10%.  As a consequence of this, many people fled to the cities, hoping to find relief there.  But in 1348 a new disaster spread across the European continent, the Black Plague, and it was at its deadliest in crowded, urban areas.  For the next one hundred and fifty years, the plague would hit at regular intervals, generally about every ten years, ultimately destroying one-half to two-thirds of the population of Europe.  And during this same time period, the continent was wracked by a bitter, one hundred years war between England and France, as well as uprisings by the peasants, who could no longer tolerate being perennial victims to both natural and man-made disasters.  A final casualty of these calamities was European commerce, and the collapse of its banks brought down the entire economy of Europe, reversing all of the gains that had been made in the last two and a half centuries.

            Naturally in troubled times, people turned to religion.  And the Christian faith held out a particular promise that had resonated with its suffering adherents since the days of the first apostles.  This was the prophecy that after a time of troubles, Christ would return to establish God’s kingdom of the elect.  In fact, it was apparent that the earliest Christians, including St. Paul, and probably Jesus himself, believed that this coming of the last judgment would happen very soon, even within a generation of Jesus's lifetime.  But as years, and then centuries, passed, this hope in an imminent second coming became less fervent, and both the leaders of the church and their followers allowed themselves to become involved in more secular concerns, until the apocalyptic catastrophes of plague, famine, and war upset the relative peace and safety of their world.  Many Christians observed that the onset of this time of troubles occurred around a thousand years after the time of Jesus, and recalled a passage in the book of Revelation, a graphic account of the last days of the world, which says that after being bound in chains for one thousand years, the devil would be released for a time to wreak havoc on the earth, before his final defeat by the powers of righteousness.  The Church, in fact, attempted to use this growing spirit of millenarianism, by channeling it against a powerful rival, the Moslems, followers of the Islamic prophet Mohammed.  In a series of military crusades begun in 1095, Christian armies attempted to capture or liberate lands under Islamic rule, with the city of Jerusalem being a particularly important objective. But after two hundred years, these crusades produced few tangible gains, and by the end of the thirteenth century even the city of Jerusalem itself was once again under control of the Moslems.

            And the Church found that it also had to contend with internal rivals, as well.  From the earliest centuries of the Christian religion, there had been heresies, or beliefs held by certain groups that were considered incompatible with the central doctrines endorsed by church leadership.  In the earliest days of Christianity, when its followers faced persecution from the government of Rome, it was thought by their leaders that too much diversity in belief would threaten their very survival.  Only a universal, or catholic, church, which was based upon consistent and coherent beliefs, could endure and not be fragmented beyond recognition in the face of resistance.  And after the Church became the state religion of the empire, tolerance for radically different beliefs was even more reduced.  While there may have been less of a perceived need for conformity, there were now much more effective measures for ensuring it.  One of the earliest heresies was Gnosticism.  The Gnostics, with their belief that the material world, and the human body, were inherently evil, and that salvation could only be attained by acquiring special knowledge, by withdrawing from the world, and by renouncing worldly desires, was opposed by the Church in the second century.  The Ebionites, a Christian sect that probably traced their origins to the Jerusalem followers of Jesus’ brother James, were also banned as heretics in the earliest centuries of Christendom.  With the rise of millenarian feelings after 1000 AD, new alternative approaches to Christian worship were explored by many individuals who were dissatisfied with the traditional practices of their time.  Some of these, such as the mystics Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Frances of Assisi, were eventually embraced by the Church as examples of Christian piety, and Bernard actually did much to stir up popular support for the Church’s crusades.  Others were bitterly, and violently, opposed.  In the late twelfth century, a wealthy French merchant named Peter Waldo, after hearing a passage from one of the Gospels, was moved to give away his possessions to the poor and become a traveling preacher.  His followers translated the bible from Latin into French so that it could be read and understood by the general population, questioned the power of the priests and abuses of Church authority, and opposed the taking of human life under any circumstances.  The Church responded by excommunicating Waldo and declaring his followers heretics, burning many of them, and driving others into hiding.  Around the same time, another sect known as the Albigenses believed, like the earlier Gnostics, in a dualistic universe, with the material world being fundamentally evil, and that the task of the soul was to liberate itself from the bonds of the world and of the flesh.  The strictest adherents abstained from sex and marriage, and from eating meat.  When efforts by the Church to contain this movement and bring its followers back to more accepted beliefs and practices met with violent resistance, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against them.  The sword of the Church, which had traditionally been turned outward, against the Moslems, was now turned inward, against peoples who believed themselves to be pious Christians.  It is said that when a soldier asked how it would be possible to tell a true Christian from a heretic in this new kind of holy war, his leader said, “Kill them all.  Good knows his own.”

The Three Ages of Joachim of Fiore 

            One of the principal catalysts of the new messianic spirit was actually a church abbot named Joachim of Fiore.  Near the end of the twelfth century, he believed that he had discovered, in the passages of the Bible, a key to determining when the next great age of God would arise on the earth.  The first age, he explained, which roughly corresponded with the events described in the Old Testament, was that of the Father, the second, which consisted of the rise of Christianity, up to Joachim’s time, was the Age of the Son.  But there would be a third and final age, he said, the Age of the Holy Spirit, in which there would no longer be a need for wealth, property or shelter, and the institutions of both Church and state would pass away.  Joachim predicted that this third and final age would come by the year 1260.  His predictions created a growing fervor and renewed hope among Christians, who wanted desperately to believe that Paradise was coming soon.  Many believed that Frederick II, king of the Germans and later holy Roman emperor, would usher in the new age.  Frederick was generally regarded as an enlightened ruler, and respected by many for his open defiance of the Pope, which had caused him to be excommunicated many times.  He had taken Jerusalem in a successful crusade in 1228, and had been eventually declared king of that city.  For those who no longer believed that the true spirit of Christianity resided in the official Church, Frederick was seen as the perfect divine agent of its purging.  And although Frederick died in 1250, ten years before Joachim’s predicted coming of the third and final age of creation, this did not deter his supporters.  Many believed that he would return from the dead as a kind of earthly messiah to usher in paradise.  For centuries afterward, the Church found itself having to contend with, and burn, “Savior Fredericks”, men who claimed that they were the Emperor Frederick II incarnate, come back to save the world.

            Another group inspired by Joachim’s predictions were the flagellants, bands of men who marched from town to town, beating themselves bloody with iron-tipped thongs.  The flagellants believed that this was an act of penitence, and that they were “straightening the path” for the coming new age.  But when they began to claim that it was only by participation in their activities that a person could be absolved from sin, they too drew the unfavorable attention of the Church, and were declared heretics.  And after the year 1260 passed uneventfully, the movement eventually took a darker turn.  When the Black Plague struck in the 1300’s, the flagellants blamed it on the Jews and incited angry mobs to attack them.  Later, they turned their wrath against the local clergy, stoning priests who tried to interfere with their public spectacles, interrupting regular church services, and attempting to confiscate and redistribute church property.  The hysteria of the flagellants reached its peak when one of their leaders, Konrad Schmid, declared himself to be the Emperor Frederick, and urged his followers to sell all of their possessions, abstain from work, and look forward to the last judgment, which he said would be coming in 1369.  But Konrad Schmid would not live to see the great event that he had predicted: he was burned by the church, and those of his followers who escaped a similar fate were left to see his predicted day of judgment pass uneventfully.

The Ten Sefirot of the Kabbalah

            While many heretical and mystical movements such as these met with swift and violent reprisals by the church, others survived, endured, and even flourished.  Although Jews were frequent victims of mob hysteria or the violent acts of overzealous crusaders, in thirteenth century Spain, a form of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah gained widespread adherents among both Jews and Christians.  In the system of Kabbalah, the transcendental and unknowable creator is linked to visible creation through ten hierarchical emanations, called sefirot, and the act of creation itself is explained as a contraction of the Divine being to allow a space for the created, visible, time-bound universe.  Man’s purpose is to “raise holy sparks” by returning the universe to the Creator by practicing repentance.  By fixing the universe, one is fixing one’s own soul, and vice versa.  The elaborate symbolic system which placed special significance upon the Hebrew letters and their numerical equivalence, along with the deeply mystical forms of meditation and contemplation, appealed to those who wanted to seek God with both their minds and their hearts.  In Germany, the theologian Meister Eckhart practiced his own form of mysticism, preaching that God is the only ultimate reality, and that man’s only link with that reality is through the divine spark that resides at the core of his inmost self.  Creatures, as Eckhart often said, are nothings, and it is only by getting past the snares of the outer self into the core of true being that one can find spiritual truth and liberation.  Eckhart’s views brought the unfavorable attention of the Church in 1327, but the stubborn preacher was prepared to stand up for and defend his views in Rome itself.  His appeal was denied, and he did not live long enough to hear the Pope declare that he had been a deceived soul, “sewing thorns and thistles amongst the faithful. . . .”

            As Europe moved into the Renaissance, its peoples developed a renewed interest in, and appreciation for, the great civilizations of the past, particularly in Italy, where ancient monuments and other relics of the old Roman Empire had always preserved a tangible link with that glorious age.  It was easy for these Italians to believe that there had been some time in the remote past where great knowledge had been gained, and secrets discovered, which had been lost in later times.  When the last remnant of the Roman Empire, Constantinople, fell to the Moslems in 1453, refugees from that city flooded into Italy, bringing with them ancient texts written by philosophers and sages from bygone eras.  Italian scholars eagerly translated these texts, and what they read only quickened their desire to find secret doctrines.  The words of the Egyptian priests to Greek visitors two thousand years earlier echoed in their ears, as the priests boasted that they had unbroken records of civilization spanning thousands of years.  The Atlantean dream of a lost Golden Age beckoned, once again.

              

            The search for the secret doctrine followed many paths.  Astrology, which had its roots in the civilization of Babylonia, was a popular pastime in the Renaissance.  Even the Pope had a personal astrologer.  A more subtle and mysterious craft was that of alchemy.  The practice of alchemy originated in Egypt, and was a curious blend of Egyptian artistry, Eastern mysticism, and the Greek philosophic idea that matter is composed of four elements, earth, air, water and fire.  The philosopher Aristotle taught that all things strive for perfection, and this idea became the basis for all later alchemical pursuits.  It was believed that through mastery of the art, one could transmute common elements into more elegant ones, like gold, but also that the human soul itself could be refined and perfected through its subtle techniques.  It was the Arabs who developed and cultivated the practice of alchemy into a truly impressive discipline, and it was through the Arabs that it was introduced into Europe, by way of Spain.  In addition to astrology and alchemy, which were often practiced together, there was a renewed interest in magic.  A book of magic spells, known as the Picatrix, was owned by many Europeans.  While some contented themselves with practicing “white”, or good magic, the art of sorcery, or black magic, also had an appeal to many.  Another ancient discipline, introduced to the Italians by the refugees from Constantinople, was that of hermeticism, based on a set of mystical writings attributed to an Egyptian sage named Hermes Trismegistus, who was believed to have lived at the time of Moses, if not much earlier.  According to legend, the wisdom attained by Hermes, and passed on in the cryptic verses of his writings, transformed him into a god.  We now know that these writings were probably composed in the second or third century AD, but the belief in their early origins gave them a special place of reverence among the Italian scribes who translated them, studied them, and shared them with enthusiastic followers.  All of these doctrines and practices, along with the Jewish Kabbalah and symbolic elements of Christian mysticism, were interwoven into intricate tapestries of new belief systems, and shared among diverse circles of the intellectually curious and spiritually starved upper classes of Europe.  In the centuries that followed, secret clubs and fraternities - generally composed of members of the aristocratic, intellectually gifted, or otherwise well-to-do members of society - devoted themselves to studying esoteric writings, which they believed had been handed down through countless generations from the dawn of civilization. 

Emerald Tablet of Hermes

            While the Church did not condone this new fascination with esoteric doctrines, most of its energies were directed against more conspicuous challenges to its authority.  In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was occupied with crushing public heresies, such as the Waldenses and Albigenses, and when its efforts were not completely successful, it organized the Inquisition, that infamous body of holy enforcers, to root out and destroy those who would dare to challenge Christian orthodoxy.  Little tolerance was shown for practices which strayed too far from tradition: even the practice of courtly love, inspired by the stories of King Arthur, was eventually banned as heretical by the Church.  And in the centuries that followed, it turned its attentions toward a new and much more pernicious enemy: the witch.  The belief in witches among the peoples of Europe had been widespread throughout the Middle Ages, but initially the church did not sanction it, contending that such a belief was itself a delusion, planted in the mind of the faithless by the Devil.  But this stance gradually changed, and in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII authorized the Inquisition to use its full powers, including the power of torture, to find and destroy witches.  This same pope commissioned two Dominican monks, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, to investigate just how much of a threat the practice of witchcraft was.  Their investigation culminated in a book, called the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches that became, for the generations that followed, a handbook for detecting, interrogating, and prosecuting witches.  Sprenger himself was responsible for burning more than five hundred witches in a single year. 

            But what caused this public fascination with witchcraft?  For while the Church may have endorsed witch-hunting, the activity would never have become a mass phenomenon without the active support of the general population.  The biggest single cause, in a word, was fear – fear of a changing world.  By the sixteenth century, it was clear to the populations of Europe that their lives were being changed in profound and often disturbing ways.  Gone were the old days of simple peasant life.  And just as the Hebrew slaves who had been freed by Moses had occasionally turned back and yearned for the earlier days when life might have been miserable, but at least was predictable, so the Europeans, who were seeing all of their traditional institutions falling away or becoming transformed in ways that they could not comprehend, looked back with nostalgia on the unpleasant, but simpler days, when a hard-working peasant always knew what the next day would bring.  As the Modern Age came into being, it brought with it a deep sense of insecurity, persistent anxiety, and outright fear.  But persistent, generalized fear becomes unbearable unless it finds an object, a focal point.  While there were, of course, always easy targets for suspicion: Jews, lepers, Muslims, and others on the margins of society, this type of intense, paralyzing fear cried out for a more worthy author.  And the religious peoples of Europe found it in the Devil.

Illustration of the Devil (Medieval Woodcut)

            The Devil as the premier, supernatural agent of evil, the adversary of God, made its way into Judeo-Christian tradition from the Persians, and their religion of Manichaeism, which saw in the universe a primal struggle between the power of light, represented by God, and the power of darkness, represented by Satan.  Satan’s role in the Old Testament had been a curious one, and at times, such as in the book of Job, it seemed that he was actually an agent of God.  But by the Middle Ages his role as an adversary and a near rival to the Creator had become clear, as had his appearance.  In the popular imagination he was now generally depicted as a large, ill-formed, hairy sprite, with horns, a long tail, cloven feet, and dragon's wings.  This was the usual costume of the devil in the early village stage plays put on by local monks that depicted the lives of the saints.

            According to popular belief, the devil and his legions generally preferred to appear to mankind on the evening between Friday and Saturday.  On special days, such as Walpurgis Nacht on April 30, and St. John’s Day, on June 23, he would hold a general meeting of witches and demons, called a Sabbath, just after midnight.  In France and England it was believed that witches traveled to the Sabbath on broomsticks; in Italy and Spain, that they were transported on the devil's back.  A typical account of one of these Sabbaths was like the following:  The devil would appear in the shape of a large he-goat.  He would select a master-of-ceremonies to conduct the affairs of the evening.  Participants were examined for the mark of the devil, after which wild and furious dancing ensued.  Witches also shared tales of the mischief that they had performed since their last meeting.  The formal ceremony would end with a dance of the toads, who then implored the witches to reward them with the flesh of unbaptized babies.  Next, a feast was shared, consisting of disgusting things for most participants, although particularly evil witches were treated with genuinely choice foods and wines.  After the meal, there was more dancing, followed by a mockery of the rite of baptism, and occasionally witches would strip and dance, each with a cat tied around her neck and a second dangling from her body in the form of a tail.  The Sabbath ended when the cock crowed.  Other accounts included tales of sexual orgies, ritual child sacrifice, and cannibalism.

Witches' Sabbath (Painting by Goya, 1798)

            Now stories like these about the gatherings of witches have some familiar undertones.  They resemble in some respects descriptions of the ancient pagan celebrations in honor of the god Dionysus.  And their more sinister aspects, involving tales of sexual debauchery and cannibalism, actually echo the stories told about the secret practices of Christians by conservative Roman folk in the first centuries of Christianity.  And just as the Romans moved swiftly and brutally to ferret out and destroy these wicked followers of a crucified Jewish rebel, so the Church used all of the techniques at its disposal to expose and destroy the followers of Satan.  The use of torture was a particularly effective method for extracting admissions of guilt from suspected witches.  Victims who confessed under duress and then recanted their confessions would be tortured again, until they repeated or expanded upon their self-incriminating testimony.  The methods used to extract these confessions were as gruesome as they were varied.  Three popular techniques included the strappado, in which a victim's hands were bound behind their back, a rope was tied to their wrists, and they were lifted off the ground (often with a weight attached to their bodies), the rack, and the thumbscrew.  But interrogators did not settle for these.  A contemporary critic who lived during the height of the witch craze, Johann Matthaus Meyfarth, summarized the variety of horrible techniques of interrogation that he had witnessed:

I have seen the limbs forced asunder, the eyes driven out of the head, the feet torn from the legs, the sinews twisted from the joints, the shoulder blades wrung from their place, the deep veins swollen, the superficial veins driven in, the victim hoisted aloft and now dropped, now revolved around, head undermost and feet uppermost.  I have seen the executioner flog with the scourge, and smite with rods, and crush with screws and load down with weights, and stick with needles, and bind around with cords, and burn with brimstone, and baste with oil and singe with torches.  In short, I can bear witness, I can describe, I can deplore how the human body is violated.

Suspected witches who cooperated during their interrogation would have some small consolation in the fact that they would be strangled before their bodies were burned at the stake.  "Unrepentant" witches, on the other hand, were usually burned alive.  But their families had to endure their own brand of suffering, over and above the grief of losing a loved one.  Relatives of a condemned witch were required to pay for the interrogation, the execution, and the banquet that the judges held after the burning.

            So how many people were victims to this cruel mania that swept across Europe during the Middle Ages?  Conservative estimates place the death toll at around 100,000 persons, but the total number could be as high as nine million.  It is safe to say that hundreds of thousands of people probably lost their lives because they were accused of being witches.  And who was the typical victim of this mania?  Most of the persons accused of witchcraft were women, generally older women, and usually of a lower economic class than those who charged them with the crime.  The accusers were just as likely to be women as men, and often they were related through marriage to the accused.  The expression, still common in modern times, that “my mother-in-law is a witch” could lead to fatal consequences hundreds of years ago.

            But did witches actually exist, and were there genuine nefarious activities that led to the wave of fanatical witch persecutions that engulfed much of Europe?  It is almost certain that many ancient traditions that were practiced in distant ages survived after the rise of Christianity.  Traditional Celtic beliefs, like those that made their way into the legend of King Arthur, for example, held certain days of the year, such as the summer solstice, in high regard, as well as certain places as sacred.  Celtic religious practices included the building of bonfires, and special ritualistic observances that honored the agricultural mysteries of death and regeneration.  Could these have been labeled as witchcraft?  Or was it simply mob psychology that accounted for this great tragedy – paranoid, overzealous persons, bitter at some misfortune that they had encountered, who vented their rage by singling out some eccentric old woman as the cause of their troubles?

            There is an even more cynical explanation for the witch craze.  During the centuries after the fall of Rome, when new nation states were coming into existence in Europe, a power struggle ensued between the kings of these new states, and the Pope.  And during this time, society itself was in a state of upheaval, as the general population contended with both natural catastrophes, such as the Black Plague, and man-made ones, such as war, exploitation, and corruption.  The general population was caught in the middle of these disasters, but had it risen up in unison against them, the results could have been catastrophic for the powers that be, both the kings and the Pope. 

          

Martin Luther

            There is no finer example of this than in the most successful and enduring revolt against the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation.  When the German theologian Martin Luther began his principled protest against what he identified as abuses of the Church in the sixteenth century, he successfully gained the support of the local German nobility.  Like St. Paul, Luther limited his radicalism to questions of theology, while continuing to respect local power structures.  By doing so, he ensured that he would be sponsored and protected by the local secular leaders, who were themselves locked in a power struggle with Church authorities.  But when one of Luther’s disciples, Thomas Muntzer, tried to use the Lutheran protest as a springboard to challenge all authority, by orchestrating a militant peasant revolt, Luther himself condemned the movement, labeling the peasants, “murdering, thieving hordes”.  And although Muntzer believed that God had guaranteed him victory in his struggle, in the end his movement would be violently crushed, and he himself beheaded, by a nobility that would not tolerate such flagrant and militant resistance to their authority.  But this same nobility defended Luther as he pressed his challenge against the authority of the Church, and in so doing created a new and independent branch of Christianity.

            Ironically, the witch craze would be just as widespread in Protestant nations as in Catholic ones.  Clearly, it was not a delusion peculiar to the Catholic Church that had caused this phenomenon.  And here is where the more cynical explanation for witch-hunting comes in.  In their methods of interrogation, local inquisitors always insisted that a suspected witch provide names of other witches.  The system guaranteed a steady supply of suspects.  And by exposing these growing lists of suspects and convicts to the general public, the local powers, whether secular or ecclesiastical, convinced the struggling masses that their problems and miseries were not caused by the state or by the church, but by a conspiracy of witches.  Witch executions were a form of popular entertainment, not unlike the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.  It is ironic that Christians, who had been responsible for bringing an end to these gladiatorial games and other brutal excesses of Roman society because of their violence, were now either actively or implicitly supporting a new public spectacle, just as bloody and gruesome, which turned the eyes of the people away from the real causes of their suffering. 

            As the witch mania began to subside, the people of Europe found renewed hope in the rise of modernity.  The magic of astrology and alchemy gave way to the sciences of astronomy and chemistry.  The religion of Christianity now offered real choices to its adherents.  A new world had also been discovered and laid bare, offering the promise of new hopes and new opportunities.  But the Europeans who visited and colonized the new world could not completely break free from old attitudes, perceptions, and prejudices, as evidenced by the Salem witch trials in the late seventeenth century.  And it was not just attitudes about witchcraft that made their way onto American soil.  Preconceptions about race would also infect the colonists from Europe, attitudes that would threaten to destroy and sabotage the great hopes and dreams that they brought with them across the Atlantic Ocean.