Yes, the Burning Times and Inquisition ("nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" sorry.) were horrid periods of history that should not have happened. Yes, they were the product of ignorance, fear, and the Christian religion.

But, very few, if any at all, of the people executed were actually witches. They certainly weren't Wiccan (Wicca was founded as a religion in the late 1940s), and no one was burned at the stake in Salem, Massachusetts. The women and men who were hung were victims of a few attention-craving little girls. They were merely fellow church-goers who made others jealous for one reason or other. When the girls started getting the attention, they had their opportunity to get rid of the people they didn’t like. And they took it. Simple as that.

The Inquisition was a bunch of over-powerful 'holy' men running around, burning and torturing people under false accusations of witchcraft and heresy. Anyone they didn’t like was labelled a heretic. There were even huge numbers of monks burned. The actual numbers of those killed is literally countless; England, relatively permissive at the time, killed 30,000 'witches' between 1542 and 1736. Benedict Carpozov, who claimed to have read the Bible through 53 times, sentenced 20,000 'devil-worshippers'. This type of slaughter went on for almost five hundred years. Rape of female prisoners was far from uncommon- quite the contrary. Rape was one of the most common forms of abuse toward the women. Many women were put into solitary confinement and visited by "zealous Catholics" (always men, as women were not allowed to visit). Sure, people confessed to charges of witchcraft- most humans will confess to anything under the lengths of torture they used.

Under Inquisition rules, girls could be prosecuted at 9½, and boys at 10½ (though, children as young as two years old were executed). The only reason secular courts received the prisoners to execute was because of the official rule stating that the church did not shed blood. Permission to strangle these prisoners before burning was given, but this was rarely done. History was written to order by the church, to say the church took no part in corporal punishment of heretics.

The Inquisition remained active until 1874, especially in Central and South America, where natives were tortured and burned for being 'witches' and disbelievers.


Before making up a sob story about how your sister-in-faith great aunt fourteen times removed having been unjustly burned at the stake in the Salem Witch Trials for being a pioneering Wiccan, so you must be a 'hereditary' witch with gianormous powers that are just latent... remember the actual history. Because the people who know better will be laughing in your face, if something vaguely like that comes out of your mouth. :)