In Europe, we had our own equivalent to the Salem witch craze. Over the years some 1000 people were burnt at the stake in Denmark, which at that time can't have had an estimated population of more than e.g. 3-4 million. Both men and women were killed as witches, but 90% of the victims of this insanity were women, and the majority were menopausal. Not that a beautiful, young woman couldn't end her life at the stake, but the fact is that most of them were more than 50 years of age. That makes me think of the fairy tale witch, ugly, warty, cruel, and murderous. In a patriarchal society, such a woman, definitely may have had cause for revenge, but what was the reason for her society to persecute her? What had she done to deserve something like torture and execution? Well, first of all she must have been a scapegoat for much of what people were taught to fear at that time, like e.g. the age-old enemy, Satan, who was supposed to be out hunting for souls all the time.
Christian was a full blooded Renaissance man who had become king at the tender age of 11. When he wasn't making babies - and he had 23 or maybe even more by several women - he waged wars or built beautiful castles. However, he really had it in for witches and took a personal interest in burning everyone who was convicted.
The witch craze wasn't the invention of King Christian as long before his birth on April 12, 1577, it had started. The first ones went in 1540 which is a few years after The Reformation of the Danish church. When we went from being Catholic to becoming Protestant, the character of Satan came into focus. All of a sudden, people had to accept another kind of personal responsibility than The Catholic Church demanded. The king at that time, Christian III, took the church riches and jailed the Catholic arch bishops in a new tupsy turvy world that played havoc on the minds of the ordinary people of the country. They must have felt threatened by all those "bad women who were Satan's handmaids". People were confused, and they became obsessed with the (imaginary) need of reporting each other.
Some unfortunate (and innocent!!!) woman might be accused of "stealing the butter luck" of someone else who found that she couldn't churn butter anymore. Another well-known "crime" was milking a cow from far off or ruin the beer.
A way to discern between ordinary women and witches was to hide a needle or a pair of scissors under her seat. If she seemingly found it hard to sit, that was a "waterproof" sign of her being a witch because they were assumed not to be able to abide steel. What's even more strange, is that in some cases, all it took was someone else dreaming about her being a witch.
The last one to be burned at the stake as a witch in Denmark was Anne Palles. In 1693 she had the audacity to threaten the bailiff, who evicted her and her husband from their farm, by turning around and pee into the farmyard. That was seen as one of the witch ways of bringinga loads of calamities upon the farm and the people who evicted her, and when Anne was tortured she confessed that she had been visited by Satan in the shape of a black cat. This nonsense from a tortured human being lead to her death at the stake, but the king at the time, Christian V, showed her mercy as he saw to it that she was beheaded before being burned.
As it is, there have been more witch cases after Anne Palles execution, but they were of a more private nature: Both in 1722 and 1800 a woman was murdered for "being a witch", and as late as 1934 the last witch accusation was submitted.
Ingen kommentarer:
Send en kommentar