The Inquisition started back in the 12th century for the purpose of finding those who held the wrong ideas about the religion. They called them Heretics. Heretics were a threat to the Church, anyone who criticized them, or by having gathered discussions other than of their religion. If you were found to be a Heretic, the Church took all your worldly possessions, your land. This gave great wealth to the Church, but also des-empowered the Heretic. Needless to say your offspring's would also be poor and without their land right.

After years of the Inquisition, Heretics began to run out and the Church was uncertain of their future. The Inquisition assumed new tactics by creating a new form of heresy. It centered on women who were always suspected of less than total commitment to their God who had declared them accursed.

In the 14th century, there were still many women practicing at least portions of the religion of their pagan ancestors. Though no longer allowed to be priestesses of their Goddess, women carried on the rites of the people still considered necessary by many to keep natural cycles in working order.

European pagans were used to seeking help from the female elders for social, psychological, or physical problems. Medicine was almost exclusively in the hands of old women for countless thousands of years, because of their supposedly innate communion with the Goddess of life and death, until churchmen claimed that disease could be cured only by holy water, exorcisms, and prayers to God  and by the laying on of priestly hands, But defying the church, people still took their illnesses and injuries to the village wise woman/midwives. The wise woman was especially important to women's mysteries, sexuality and reproduction, which male doctors generally avoided. However, the church claimed that a midwife harmed the faith by easing women's pain in birth giving, against the will of their God who imposed it on women as punishment of Eve's original sin. So they were labeled a witch and was put to death. If they helped women from getting pregnant, they were burned as a witch.

The church was against female healers stating that women who cured sickness without having studied medicine at a university, was a witch and must die. The catch here was that women were not allowed to go to a university. Restrictions of medical training did not apply to men. Even without formal education, male wizards or "conjurers" were allowed to cure sickness by magical arts at the same time females were executed for it for being a witch.

Laws of the Church took away most of women's traditional roles one by one: priestess, midwife, healer, landowner, lawmaker, judge, historian, craftswoman, merchant, record keeper, spiritual adviser, etc. The only female role men could not take was that of mother. But even that they tried to take away from women both through conception and symbolically. The Church claimed that the new human soul dwelt only in its father's semen. The mother's body was mere "soil" where the divine seed could grow into a baby. Saint Thomas Aquinas proclaimed this, adding that every girl child was a defective male, conceived only because her father was ill, weak or in a state of sin at the time.

Witchcraft, as a profession, remained embedded in medieval village life. It was almost the only respectable profession still open to women. A Dominican father declared that "most women" copied the occult ways of their mother Eve, the first witch, and that any woman "by herself" knew more magic than a hundred men.

Witches became universal scapegoats. When anything went wrong, the weather turned bad, failed crops, houses burned, the cry of witchcraft was raised. All the common troubles of the human conditions were attributed to witches. The witch killers were sadists without limit. There was no point where they would voluntarily stop torturing. Records show that the agony could go on for days, weeks or months, long past the time when victims were wholly broken down, desperate to confess, and pleading to be told what to say, so that they would stop inflicting pain on them.

Inquisitors asserted that in punishment of witches, "eternal damnation should begin in this life, that it might be in some way shown what will be suffered in hell. The vision of hell was invented by men who needed to contemplate victims who could never die, torture that would never end. It was their idea of a suitable reward for their own righteousness.

One of the cruelest aspects of the witchcraft persecution was its punishment of women for doing things that men were free to do such as practicing medicine, reading philosophy, training animals, giving spiritual advice, studying the lore of nature, alchemy, or the stars.

The Inquisition's campaign to cut women off from their own direct experience of spiritual vision, or their Goddess-given moral codes, occupied nearly five centuries of European history. About nine million persons were executed after 1484, and uncounted numbers before that date, mostly women. The executions were carried out with a brutality exceeding that of any other organized persecution ever known, not excepting the Nazi's 20th century holocaust.

It would be a strange revolution indeed if women as a group ever became as cold, brutal, and arrogant toward the male sex as the male sex has been toward women in historical times. 

Excerpt From "The Crone" by Barbara Walker

MAIDEN, MOTHER, AND CRONE

The Lady has three and She shows them to you
Youthful Maiden, Mother and Crone
Remember Her in all that you do
And you never will be alone.

The Maiden is huntress at the time of Beltane
fires burn on hilltops ablaze
She chases the King Stag, a babe to obtain,
A child for the Goddess, the Mother to raise.

The Mother, she waits for her children to grow,
Teaching each to care for the Earth,
She brings them the knowledge that they all must know,
"Till She is the Crone and awaits Her rebirth.

The Crone she is aged and bent o'er her cane,
Wisdom is her duty to leave,
She must impart all that she's obtained,
The Lady awaits her and Peace she'll receive.

To be sung to the tune of "Scarborough Fair"

Taken from "Of Witches" By Janet Thompson

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