Witchcraft: The Hammer Of Witches

The word witch is like the word women and unsurprisingly women was about 80 percent of accused witches In early modern europe and most of them women were prosecuted for witchcraft. As a result of this there are no pages in human history more filled with horror than with records of witch madness of three centuries from the fifteenth to the eighteenth. Today looking back many historians believe that the witch hunts were a war against women.

The communities that were fearful and hunting witches were organised towns and villages with moral values and strong beliefs in God. There was a mystery cast over witchcraft that it was believed “Witchcraft is an internal power some people possess and an inborn property which they inherit. Witches can

This causes a effect where people begin accusing women. This made women seem weaker and more easily tempted by the Devil to do his acts and fall from the path of God and also from the story of Genesis. It’s Eve who takes the apple, the forbidden fruit and exiles Adam and humanity from Eden. This thought was held by most of the people and by “The Hammer of Witches”, the handbook that was a guide when it came to hunting witches and determining whether or not a person was a witch or warlock. It was published by Catholic inquisition authorities in 1485-1486. The handbook is filled with hatred of women and has no worries about spreading these views for example the text “ All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours. Women are by nature instruments of Satan , they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation. It is not hard to see why people would immediately assume disasters or accidents were the work of weak or malicious women in the area” comes from the

This tells that it was not just women affected by the trials but at the same time many women were still executed. But there is a chance that women did actually perform rituals and attempt to gain power and magic from the Devil. Women who were on the bottom part of society, looked down by everybody. It’s possible in their time of desperate need for money or food they begged to the Devil or sought to use his power to punish those who would not give charity or disrespected them. After all these were women who were treated as rats and in their eyes God had forsaken them, they needed some support in their lives and turned to Satanism.“This was heavily promoted by both Catholic and Protestant churches through the 16th century and beyond. The belief offered the neatest solution to the dilemma of theodicy, the theological conflict caused by the presence of evil in the universe that was created by an all-loving, moral God. The Church theorized that Satan worship existed, was widespread, and was a massive threat to the established order. These beliefs gave the legal and moral justification for the Witch burnings”therefore it gave the authorities power