the second half of the fourteenth century witchcraft, first tolerated, was defined as a crime, the culmination of a process of legal system matter of demonic magic. The aversion to magical practices of the Church grew especially in the fifteenth century, when it was more clearly oriented toward women, giving rise to the phenomenon of "witch hunt", a tragedy that he brought a large number of arson.
magic is commonly called the set of practices that a company, you usually live mostly on agriculture, put in place to control or predict the weather, to get fertility land and promote or limit the people. These rituals are kept secret because they also provide practical negative: the erotic, when we want to coerce the individual will, "make love ', or affect the fertility or infertility, or infanticide to limit ports in times of difficulty, or the" theft magic "of the crops from one field to' another or the evil eye cast on his neighbor's cattle.
During the slow conversion to Christianity, the old rites rustic Mediterranean that Europe had inherited from the gods of the Greeks and Romans and the northern gods of the Celts and Romans, who continued to live, even until the eleventh, XII, XIII century. In the Germanic area, particularly towards the east, the diffusion worship the new God had been conducted largely with weapons and not accepted by the people only because they wanted so their conquerors or their king, but when the soldiers went away, what could be done to maintain the missionary priest Christianity imposed by force of arms? It could only create a sense Christian to preach the cult of the old gods who could not erase from people's memory. Without denying their existence, simply explained that they were demons.
already mentioned in early medieval texts, the witches claimed to fly riding demons transformed into animals and Augustine (354-430) said that they used for this ointments. Some people think that these ointments were compounds with hallucinogenic drugs and perhaps not coincidentally, centuries later, a English inquisitor was told that the ointment was the women fall into a deep sleep, a trance that made them insensitive to all but the trance could also be introduced by a phenomenon of self-hypnosis which the ointment was the symbolic gesture.
Why only women? It is difficult to answer this question, difficult to explain the wave of misogyny, which then began to occur as soon as the ' ' Inquisition said the line of intolerance, when many women have been subject to increasingly stringent interrogation, they ended to confess demonic practices, perhaps to escape, at least for a while, the pressure of physical and psychological torture, or because their simplicity made them helpless against the culture and the strength of the inquisitor. It is true that much of the popular magic had always been practiced by women, who were in the hands of the secrets of fertility - fertility, contraception, abortion - and to which so many secrets were entrusted to the community and also an important part of magical practices a traditional society in which the relationship between births and deaths must always be in balance because there was food for all. Herbalists, midwives, paediatricians first. And then, of course, even witches.
The three most important dates at the start witch-hunting are the 1348, when some women who lived isolated, often herbalists, midwives or healers were accused of witchcraft and lynched by the people, becoming one of the scapegoats of the plague, 1484, when the pope, alarmed by the news events of witchcraft occurred in Germany, intervened against certain women who had been accused of apostasy of faith, sexual intercourse with the devil and the damage to people, animals and fruits of land, 1487, when two interrogators wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a treaty that established for the first time that witchcraft was only women that witches were not visionary, as Augustine had written, but really had relationships with devil, and because children who had never practiced contraception or abortion. The night flight and the sabbath, he said, they were dreams or hallucinations, but really took place.
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