Defamation and the Devil: False Accusations of Witchcraft

certainly do testify. That quote is from Arthur Miller's partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials, The Crucible, written in Welcome to criminal Lea. I'm mariach Murky and I'm Holly Fry. And let's talk about which panic. If your crime is falsely accusing and then punishing an alleged witch, what led up to that moment? Well, it was probably

more than one thing. There's a lot of talk about the religious factors that have long been part of purging, which is, and while that is often a fair explanation based on the time and place, it isn't and can't

be the only explanation. Things like misogyny jealousy, dreams. There are a lot of ingredients in this particular cauldron, and it's kind of unclear exactly when which has hit the world's radar, But there they are in historical and fictional writing that goes back thousands of years into ancient times. These stories about them and references to them teach us that which is have long been considered dangerous and that

we should fear, punish and silence them. Marian Gibson, Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter, continues along this idea, saying which is are often used as quote a shorthand symbol for persecution and resistance, misogyny and feminism in partic killer, So let's go back, way back looking for witches. The Code of Hammurabi was one of the earliest and most complete written legal codes, two hund eighty two laws in total, ranging from topics like

family law to criminal law. It was proclaimed by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, who reigned from sevent b c E to seventeen fifty BC. In this text is a record of some of the earliest examples of the laws of retribution. Rules we all actually know, such as an I for an eye. It's also one of the earliest written examples of the idea of an accused person being considered innocent

until proven guilty. But what we're interested in really is in the second Edict about how to punish witches, and it reads quote, if a man has put a spell upon another man, and it is not yet justified, he upon whom the spell is laid shall go to the Holy River. Into the Holy rivers shall he plunge. If the Holy River overcomes him and he is drowned, the man who put the spell upon him shall take possession

of his house. If the Holy River declares him innocent, and he remains unharmed, the man who laid the spell shall be put to death. He that plunged into the river shall take possession of the house of him who laid the spell upon him. So malevolent magic, it's practice and its punishment is also addressed in the early law codes of ancient Egypt. So we're talking to three thirty

two b C. A very long period of time. One of the earliest written stories of a specific which comes from the Bible and was composed probably between and seven roughly, so according to a story in the Book of Samuel in the Old Testament, the Witch of Endor had an interesting power. She had a fetish with which she could summon the dead. At the request of King Saul of Israel, she summoned to the recently deceased prophet Samuel's spirits to

help the king defeat the Philistine army. She did raise Samuel, but he did not offer any advice against the Philistines. He instead prophesied the death of Saul and his sons. What came to pass was as he had said. After fighting the Philistines at Mount Gilboa, Saul wounded killed himself by falling on his own sword to avoid being captured by the enemy. Another early written record of a witch is found in Homer's Odyssey, written right about eight hundred BC.

It's in this poem where we meet Searcy, a sorceress known for her knowledge of potions and herbs, and who, according to her myth, could transmute humans into swine. And Greek mythology is of course filled with witches. And then there's Empress Chen of Wu. She was empress of the Han dynasty and the first wife of Emperor Wu of Han. She lived between one st E and one ten BC, give or take a year on both of those numbers, and first ten had trouble getting pregnant and couldn't give

birth to a child. She had not had a son. Becoming jealous of her husband's mistresses who were bearing his children, she turned to magic. She retained witches to help her curse his concubines and to win his love back, and in some versions of her life story she's described as having her own witchcraft practice, but not all include that. When she was found out, she was placed under house arrest, where she would stay through the end of her life.

Nearly three hundred of her attendants were accused and executed on witchcraft charges. We are going to take a break for a word from our sponsor, and when we're back, we're going to look at some of the large scale witch trials that took place in Europe. Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about what the Hammer of the Witches was and why it was the bestseller for almost two hundred years.

Stories and images of witches have described, which is in various ways throughout history, from wart No sisters huddling over a cauldron of boiling liquid to those wearing pointy hats and cackling while riding through the sky on broomsticks, and pretty much everything in between. If you were to describe almost any human, that's what a witch has looked like at some point in time. The actual history of witches is dark, and, as we've seen throughout the season, often

deadly for the accused witches. Historians have identified a number of key developments that led to what is known as witch panic. We're gonna start in when Pope John whose papacy lasted from thirteen sixteen to four, officially declared that witchcraft was heresy and that meant that those who were accused of practicing it could be tried under the inquisition. The idea that which is were in bed literally and figuratively with the devil was game changing, and that idea

caught like wildfire. The publication of the book Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, was written in fourteen eight six, and that continued to stoke people's fears. The Hammer of which is was essentially a handbook on how to identify, interrogate, and punish whiches, and it did not take long for it to become the authority for both Protestants and Catholics, trying to purge their villages and cities of that perceived evil.

It was republished twenty six times between fourteen six and sixteen sixty nine, and for more than one hundred years that book sold more copies of any other book in Europe except for the Bible, which is were believed by early Christians in Europe to be evil. There was no concept of a white witch or a benevolent magic, which hysteria really had a grip on Europe during the mid

fifteenth century, and things kept snowballing. Up to eighty thousand accused whitches were executed in Europe between the years fifteen hundred and sixteen sixty, and as many as eight of them were women who were believed to have had a pact with the devil. Witch hunts were common, and being a witch hunter was an actual occupation, although many of the accused confessed, as we know, that was often under torture, and often that was extreme torture. Most were executed by

burning at the steak or hanging. Single women, widows, and other women on the margins of society were especially targeted. Madeline Miller, an American novelist and author of the book Sercy and Adaptation of Various Greek myths talks about which is as women with quote more power than men have felt comfortable with. Looking with a modern eye at the large scale witch trials in Europe and in colonial America makes a lot of us wonder how could this happen?

And why wasn't it stopped? It wasn't like it was done in secret, So what was going on? Let's talk about a few of these now infamous trials and what scholars think about the events now that we are centuries down the road. The largest single witch trial in Swedish history, and also one of the largest mass killings of which is in recorded history, took place in tour Soccer, a

village in central Sweden in sixteen seventy five. It began when Laurentios Kristofori Hornios, a priest of the Church of Sweden, was instructed to investigate witchcraft within his parish. He did so by then instructing two young boys to identify, which is by the invisible devil's mark on their forehead as they walked into church. They did this, and the accused suspected of abducting children and taking them to Satan's Sabbath.

Seventy one people were executed by beheading and burning in a single day after two children claimed they saw a mark on them that no one else could see. Also happening during the mid seventeenth century. Let's let's turn to Germany's Which trials. The Vertzburg Witch Trials took place in southwestern Germany, a region where the highest concentration of which trials occurred during the years fifteen sixty one to sixteen seventy.

It was one of the four largest witch trials in Germany, alongside the Trier Which Trials, the Fulda Witch Trials, and the Bamberg Witch Trials. The Vertzburg Witch Trials took place between sixteen twenty five and sixteen thirty one, and that was one of the biggest mass trials and one of

the biggest witch trials in history. One hundred fifty seven people men, women and children in the city of Verurtzburg are confirmed to have been executed, and an estimated nine hundred were executed or died in custody in the entire prince Bishopric of Wurzburg. That was the larger ecclesiastical principality of the Holy Roman Empire. The accusations and executions took place during the Thirty Years War, a conflict between Protestants

and Catholics between sixteen eighteen and sixteen forty eight. The trials were conducted by a Catholic prince bishop with an agenda of introducing the counter Reformation, a Catholic resurgence to his lamp. This isn't a unique story, and the craze of the sixteen twenties was not confined to Germany. Scholars have suggested that politics, weather, poor economy, and weak government could all have contributed to the witch trial period in Europe.

But according to a relatively new theory argued by economists Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ, these trials were also away for both the Catholic and Protestant churches to compete with each other for religious followers. They right and we quote.

Similar to how contemporary Republican and Democrat candidates focused campaign activity in political battle grounds, historical Catholic and Protestant officials focused which trial activity in confessional battle grounds during the Reformation and Counter Reformation to attract the loyalty of undecided Christians. So these battle grounds were places where Protestantism had made in roads, and that meant that people had a choice about which church they wanted to be a part of.

And that is an interesting ingredient to add to this cauldron. Indeed, we're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors, So get ready for the Salem witch Trials and how Massachusetts has since apologized when we returned. Welcome back to Criminalia. There are so many theories about what caused the Salem witch trials. At least one has to be true, perhaps more than one. Let's review. Just as this hysteria was beginning to wane in Europe, it was

growing in the Americas. The Salem witch Trials, though not the first witch hunt in the Thirteen Colonies or Colonial America, are perhaps the most famous in that time and place. So this is back to January of six two in Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when Reverend Paris's daughter Betty, aged nine, and his niece Abigail Williams, age eleven, began having what we're described as fits. The girls screamed, uttered peculiar sounds, and contorted themselves into strange positions with

no explanation for their alarming behavior. A local doctor was summoned and diagnosed them as being under the control of something supernatural. You got it, This was the work of a spell and they were bewitched. And Putnam, age eleven, also began to experience similar episodes, as did Elizabeth Hubbard,

aged seventeen. By the end of February, Pressured by local magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, the girls accused three women, Tichiba, an enslaved woman in the Paris' is home, Sarah Good, a widow who was living in poverty, and Sarah Osborne, a woman in her late forties who had scandalously married a man who she had hired to work in her home.

Four leaders in the community, Sergeant Thomas Putnam and his brother, Deacon Edward Putnam, Joseph Hutchinson, and Thomas Preston, filed claims on behalf of the miners, which led to the arrests of the three women. All three of them were tried and sentenced to execution by hanging. On June tenth, Bridget Bishop, an older woman known for her gossipy habits and rumored promiscuity, was not the first to be accused, but what as the first to be put to death when she was

hanged at Proctor's Ledge. In total, more than two hundred people were accused and one fifty people were arrested, thirty were found guilty, and nineteen were executed by hanging. Five others died in jail. Women weren't the only victims here. Six men were also accused, convicted, and executed. One man, an elderly farmer named Giles Corey, is the only person ever to be pressed to death by order of a

court to bewitched. Dogs were also killed. The trials ended in six when a new Superior Court of Judicature banned the use of spectral evidence, such as dreams or visions as testimony. It had been a key component in the conviction of many witches. The girls, for instance, testified that Sarah Osborne had appeared to them and pinched and poked them with knitting needles. That's spectral evidence at work in

the courtroom. Hearsay, gossip and really any unsupported assertions were routinely admitted in court, and of course that kind of evidence is impossible to disprove those accused of being which is were slandered, and they were denied their rights. The exact cause of the Salem which trials remains contested, but there's no lack of theories for how such a frenzy of defamation and wrongful death could happen. At the time, Salem Village was a very small town and populated mostly

by Puritans. Those who lived there were religious, and they absolutely believed in the existence of the devil. Fear of the devil, we should say, is never really doubted here as a significant factor, but there are several other contributing ideas. Some experts have suggested over the years that it was

actually war that drove this. The American Indian Wars were ongoing, in particular King Philip's War between indigenous inhabitants of New England and New England's colonists and their indigenous allies during the late sixteen seventies may well have contributed to the hysteria that descended upon Salem. The war between France and the American colonies, known as King William's War to the Colonists, began in sixteen eighty nine and covered regions of Upstate

New York, Nova Scotia, and Quebec. Salem housed refugees, so that offered up a source of financial strain for the village, and at the very least, war fought at your door was sure to have caused some intense anxiety. Mary Beth Norton, an American historians specializing in American colonial history, believes that the wars may have impacted the trials in another way.

She suggests that because of the number of failed military campaigns in King Philip's War, local officials blamed not their own weaknesses on the battlefield, but rather that any failure was clearly the work of the devil, and that would have normalized that idea as an excuse, and it made it really easy for people to point fingers at anyone that they thought was in league with Satan, especially if

their life was just going wrong in some way. Another theory is discussed in the book Entertaining Satan, Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, where author and historian John Putnam Demos explores the idea that the Salem witch Trials can be boiled down to teenage rebellion and boredom in a strict Puritan society, in addition to war and

various social factors coming into play. The weather is also something that has been suggested as a potential cause or contributing ingredient for all of the trials that we've talked about.

In two thousand four, now economics professor at Brown University Emily Auster pointed out that both Europe and North America were experiencing a little ice age between roughly thirteen hundred and eighteen seventy, and the effects of that meant things like food shortages, crops would fail, fish and animals didn't migrate,

and the economy to a downturn and people suffered. Says Aust quote, people would have searched for a scapegoat in the face of deadly changes in weather patterns, and because people believed, which is, could control natural forces such as the weather, which is, we're blamed. Let's talk about one more theory at play here. Proposed in the nineties seventies, this theory suggests that hallucinogenic fungi is to blame for the salem which trials. First introduced by Linda Kapol, professor

at renstile Or Polytechnic Institute. This theory suggests that urgic poisoning may have caused the girl's symptoms. Urge can be found growing in rye and wheat under the right conditions, and researchers have found that the weather conditions in Salem that winter met those growing conditions. Ergotism can cause hallucinatory L s D like effects in a person and can cause vertigo, crawling sensations on your skin, extremity, tingling, headaches, hallucinations,

and seizure like muscle contractions. It's entirely possible and really pretty likely in terms of odds, that several of these influences were in play, and of course the people in the middle of these events would not have recognized these factors as the drivers for their behavior. No one was like, I have anxiety about the war, I'm going to find a witch to blame it on. They just felt fear and anxiety and suspected there must be something mystical involved.

Some towns and countries have since acknowledged the tragic events and have expressed regret for the accusations and deaths. On January fourteenth, the General Court ordered a day of fasting and prayer in remembrance of the victims of the Salem witch trials. Five years after those trials, and executions. Samuel Sewell, the judge who presided over the Salem witch trials, publicly

apologized for his misjudgments. In seventeen o two, the court formally declared the trials unlawful, and in seventeen eleven the colony passed a bill restoring the rights of those accused and cleared their names. It granted restitution to their heirs as well. It wasn't until the nineteen fifty seven that the General Court of Massachusetts issued an apology to the

descendants of some of the witches who were executed. It read, and we quote, the General Court of Massachusetts declares its belief that such proceedings, even if lawful under the province Charter and the law of Massachusetts as it then was, were, and are shocking and the result of a wave of popular hysterical fear of the devil in the community. Massachusetts state legislature was officially exonerating names of the accused witches

as recently as the two thousands. Massachusetts was the first widely publicized witch pardon, but it is certainly not the only occurrence. Just earlier this year, more than seven hundred women executed for witchcraft between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries were posthumously pardoned by the Catalan Regional Parliament. Similar initiatives have happened in Scotland, Switzerland and Norway. Let's have a drink to toast all of this. This is a super

yummy one. It's also a really easy one to make, a non alcoholic form if you want just a little refreshing, slightly bubbly sip. I am calling it witchcraft, which means that you get to do your own little bit of alchemy in the kitchen because you gotta make some rosemary syrup. That's all. It's super easy. So all you need to do for that is get a couple of nice, kind of fat spriggs of rosemary, throw it in a saucepan with like a couple of water. Get it boiling. I

know there's a diversion here. Some people will pull the rosemary out at that point and then add the sugar. I add the sugar and let it keep going, and I turned it down quite low. I let the rosemary sit in there a little longer because it just infuses a little better. In my opinion, you get a fuller flavor, and I always want more. I'm that person that's like it's a delicate flavor. No, thank you. I just like

more robust flavor. So then when it starts to thicken up, you will go ahead and pull those rosemary springs out. If any of the little prickly pine like leaves are stuck in there, give them a little scoop out, and then let it go for just a little longer until it starts to thicken, and then you can turn the heat off and let it cool. And then when it's cool, you're ready to make your cocktail. It's gonna be an ounce and a half of vodka. I just did a

regular one. I think if you play with flavored particularly herbal voe, because you can get something really interesting here. But ann ounce and a half of vodka, three quarters of an ounce of your rosemary syrup that you've just made, three quarters of an ounce of lemon juice, and then three ounces of pomegranate juice. You're gonna combine that all you can do in a shaker, or you can do

in the glass, and then on top of it. Because I found that to be a little too that's a little too heavy on the flavor, because the pomegranate juice is so it has a lot of flavor or and it totally will take over everything. So I put another two ounces of just club soda on top of it, and that made it like super refreshing and softened up that heavy, almost syrupy flavor you can get sometimes from pomegranate. And it was absolutely delightful, And so we're calling that witchcraft.

This is one of those ones where I really hope that people will use the basic structure and do some experiments, because like you could make your syrup with different herbal ingredients. You can do that syrup with sage or with mint syrup is obviously super easy, peasy and lovely to do, or like coriander, you could do dill syrup very interesting. So you could play with that. You can play with your juice, You could play with whatever spirit you want

to do. Just remember the kind of balanced formula of two parts of your spirit, whether you're using like gin or vodka, or you could try it with some of the brown spirits. I didn't, but you do could. And then two parts of your spirit, one part of syrup and one part of lemon juice, which you could also do as a lime juice. You want that citrus in there to make the syrup flow a little more evenly, in combine with everything together, and then whatever juice you

delight in. You could make all kinds of things, and then you add club soda or like I've done but many times on the show, a sugar free ginger ale when you need to soften it up a little delightful. The mocktail version is super easy. Just leave out the vodka, do everything else. You're still going to get that really bright, beautiful flavor that the citrus and the syrup bring out. Kind of interact with the juice in a fun way, play and play. I encourage you to do your own

little your own cocktail spells with that one. But we just call it witchcraft. And now I have Frank Sinatra in my head. I do want to give myself a personal shout out and some points. Anyone that knows me knows I love Star Wars, and yet I did not make a witch of end or cocktail based on her heart. I was surprised by that too. I'm not saying I'm not making one for home use, just not for this show. I won't even go deep. But if you've never watched

the Ewok animated series. I'm just saying there's some precedent here. In any case, I hope that you try some cocktail witchcraft of your own and come up with something utterly delicious. If you do, if you come up with a real winner, share it with us on social with the hashtag Criminalia. We'll find it, probably make it ourselves. It should be like in alchemy symbols, where you're like your weight tiger,

hide your secrets. But in any case, thank you so much for hanging out with us this week and talking through this sort of strange history of witch trials and what possibly led to them. We will be right back here next week with the discussion of our favorite stuff this season, so we hope you are here for that. We will sure be here on Criminalia h Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I

Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.