October, 2010 Given as part of Senior University Georgetown's Fall 2010 program.
   See also: 1a. Introduction to the Renaissance  1b. The Early History of Printing        2. Neoplatonism, Humanism, Other New Philosophical Trends   3. Syphilis: The Great Pox as an Acute Epidemic   4: Early Renaissance Medicine  ;                   (see lecture 5 part 1... this is  Lecture 5 part 2)               6 Summary          

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History is complex, and we should resist efforts to oversimplify it. The witch-hunts then (when there was a widespread deep belief in actual witches, demons, and Satan) and nowadays (when it's more metaphorical but still interestingly an expression of mass psychology) all resist excessive reduction.

The concept of "perfect storm" has become a theme in our culture, a convergence of multiple vulnerabilities whose aggregate effect tip the balance into some catastrophic result---originally applied to weather and sea factors related to a boat, but more recently explaining how electrical grids in part of the nation get overloaded, etc. Perhaps that is part of it.


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The Witch Craze, Part 2

51   So what causes the witch craze?? Projection, mainly, about which more in a moment. I mentioned stress. Hysterical responses of sexually frustrated girls, especially, who were supposed to not have those feelings.. This carried into the early 20th century...   Some causes of the witch-craze:
Sexual hysteria / misogyny?
Disguised anti-semitism (Someone to scapegoat once the Jews had begun to emigrate east to Poland-Lithuania)
Age-ism, attention-seeking-children
Increased overall stress seeking scapegoats
Diversion from discontent with the Church
Attempt by Church to dominate increased interest in esotericism (lecture 2)
Lurid confessions extracted by the fear/threa/actuality of torture
Printed scandal sheets (even then!)
Financial gain from confiscation of accused assets
Status and financial gain from professional prosecutors and hunters

     And by the boys, girls, yuk, carried into adulthood...

52   And heathen-ism, belief in foreign gods, was a big theme. Religion was a very competitive industry, god was imagined to be very jealous. This is still prevalent, as if God of a billion galaxies really cared whether you were a presbyterian or a methodist, or even a catholic, or even a moslem, or even an atheist...    The more foreign, the worse... Very ethnocentric..
    The imposition of Christianity on nonbelievers is a whole ‘nother topic...

53 cultural factors, more us versus them

54  a bit more about scapegoating.  People can’t imagine that healthy happy people can do this, but much propaganda feeds on the us versus the them psychology..

55 and since anger is a sin, conflicts get buried instead of worked out. I teach my clients to argue with me, to feel empowered to correct me when I get it wrong. Not if, but when I get it wrong. This is a new and corrective experience—an authority figure who asks to be corrected...

56 I mentioned misogyny. One interesting example is that women witches couldn’t have their own power. They just summoned or became channels for masculine demons. Interesting example of patriarchy, the assumption that power had to be masculine...

57 The Witch craze started and gradually warmed up over a century and then the curve starts rising, the number of people looking for witches, the number of books and pamphlets published about witches, and this took another hundred and fifty years. The time a notion, a fashion, a deep theme may take to percolate through a culture is often to be measured in centuries rather than decades—that’s one of the point of this lecture...

58   and very sincere people talk with others, feed and cross feed their gossip and legends, write books, and add to the fuel. This book was written in the face of growing skepticism. There’s that kind of tension that happens, too: There’s no witches. Are too!

59 they work this way and that way, I have illustrations and anecdotes, what more do you need for proof, to read it on the internet?

60. But that transition begins to happen...

61 Piraro cartoon

62 Investigation 

63 seems logical enough get fuzzy cartoon

64. Witches float

65 ducking

66 more ducking–well into the Georgian era.  It was ghastly really..

67 the strappado 

68 King James supervised, so it must be okay

69   Find their familiars..

70 Actually, the Inquisition didn’t do that much against witches, though some. I don’t doubt that some torturers cross-trained into other venues when work was light. Confessions are just another product.

71 water torture...This stuff terrifies me. I’m more terrified by those who claim to be fighting terrorists than I am of the so-called terrorists themselves. Worse than halloween. If you confess, you get killed painfully, if you don’t, well you just have to go through more untill you confess..

72 And professionals who had no sexual scoptophilia, the turn on from looking, no, they were professionals... etc...

73..  Let’s turn to the United States. Do you remember the salem witch trials. Read or see Arthur Miller’s the crucible. Recognized its veiled allusions to the McCarthy anti-communist sort-of witch-hunts... or at the height of the Patriot Law post 9-11... it can happen here...

74 The drama is complex, everyone had a story. Can you imagine taking each of these roles in turn in a sociodrama? That’s how I’d teach history.

75. Top people testified, people who knew, smart, authoritative... and dead wrong..  What can that tell us about our leaders?

76.  Another painting some years later..

77 So now let’s turn to punishment...   Not a whole lot worse than the investigation, and indeed, many confessed probably just to get it over with.. No use not confessing... what a feeling that must have been!  As I say, the news of our own troops torturing for information has shaken me deeply.

78. Burning— you know, Ingrid Bergman being burned at the stake in the Joan of Arc movie made me cry—it was sad and all—but the true horror of the degrees of pain were not communicated by Hollywood. They wouldn’t have been allowed to issue the picture!

79. But back then, as we talked about with syphilis, pain was good. Some monks whipped themselves. It drove the demons out, softened God’s judgment against you, maybe saved you from several thousand years of purgatory or hell, it built character. Lots of mentally ill people in that era were whipped as a mode of treatment, with driving the demons out as rationalization. Don’t even get me started about the prevalence of remarkably harsh forms of child abuse that were common through the first third of the 20th century, except to say that “spare the rod” has been a comfortable justification for parental and teacher sadism for millennia. Well, how else can you get them to learn? The idea that they—parents and teachers—might have been very shallow in their own knowledge of pedagogy was truly inconceivable to them.

80. The scandal sheets were operating then as they did back then.

81. Some cases were very complex, mixed with all sorts of politics, as applied to the priest who did have sex with the nuns under his care, and was finally burned alive for sorcery rather than just sinful sex.

82 Of course, he made a pact with the devil, and it was right there in black and white. I found the construction of the signatures of the various sub-demons intriguing.
      That torture was liberally applied to all parties made no impact on the judicial authorities of the time. Confessions must be true, however they are extracted. Has anyone reminded our military justice system of this simple principle or are we supposed to support all our troops, even the fools and nasty ones? 

83. Well, the witch-craze was dying down by the early 1700s, but not fast enough. Innocent people were still being officially murdered (that’s an earthier term for the blander and content-disguising euphemism of execution. As if executions, since they’re official, are always justified. Interesting use of language.)

84. There was treatment, too, but sort of the same treatment as for much mental illness.

85. Here’s a picture of both sides.

86. First just to remind you of how bad the bad guys are... the same old propaganda

87   And the same kinds of treatment... maybe a little different today, but alas, reading people’s stories of their hospital experiences, in many seemingly more modern settings, I fear that modern psychiatry isn’t being practiced with more skill and subtlety than fifty years ago. I sure wouldn’t want to be a patient in lots of places.

88. Restraint

89.  But considering mental illness was still a step forward, considering it wasn’t demons, but something that should be treated


90   This physician has thus become considered one of the pioneers of modern psychiatry

91, You’re not bad, you’re sick..    And while this was parodied in West Side Story song, Gee Officer Krupke, the idea planted a seed for the humane treatment of the mentally ill. Before that and yet for two centuries afterwards, till the late 1700s, the mentally ill were kept in chains, neglected, beaten, etc.

92. The theme of challenging authority existed then and exists today. Don’t believe a thing I say. Check it out, think for yourselves. Buddha said it, I say it, the whole idea of belief is to be more finely thought through. There are elements that are useful in some settings and elements that propagate folly. We need to look at words and challenge the idea that we know really what they mean and what those meanings imply.

93. So the time line shows a lightening.

94 hold-outs

95 hell-fire preachers

96 televangelists today serving saint moneytrap

97   But traditional ideas are not given up easily

98   And the ageist stereotype was deepened

99 The painter Goya in Spain tried to play within the system but also to subtly undermine the pervasive superstitions of not only the people but also those in power.

100. Another goya

101 another goya around early 1800...  Point being that belief in witchcraft died slowly and in some people’s minds it never died...

102   good and bad news

103   age-ism,   what are these hats called?

104 Modern-day wicca   

105 Santayana again

106 next week. 
In Egypt, evidence of the presence of smallpox is the markings on the face of the mummy of thePharaoah, Ramses V, around 1150 BCE:.

 

Of course, there could be stories for each of the following breatkthroughs, but I haven’t read up enough about the details.

What may have been be one of the last cases of smallpox.	Polio immunization in India.

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References

Cawthorne, Nigel. (2003). Wtich-hunt: history of a persecution. London: Arcturus.
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