Who Burned the Witches

Since the Enlightenment, rationalists have liked to cite witch burning as a prime example of medieval ignorance and religious (usually Catholic) bigotry run amok. (Leftists today still denounce it as a cynical plot by the strong against the weak.)

Writing history that way was simple: Historians catalogued horrors, disparaged religion (or at least someone else’s religion), and celebrated the triumph of science and liberal government.

The history of witchcraft seemed a settled issue in 1969 when Hugh Trevor-Roper published his classic essay, “The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.”

But a clamor of new voices has since reopened the controversy. Members of the growing neopagan revival — 200,000 strong in America today — claim witches burned during the great witch-hunt as their martyred forebears.

In 2000, a consortium of pagan leaders demanded a special apology from Pope John Paul II on the Jubilee Day of Pardon. They mourned a “pagan Holocaust” of nine million secret nature-worshippers exterminated by Christians 500 years ago under the Inquisition.

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