Dbq Witch Hunt

Symposium Essay
Witch Hunts

As you have heard, witch legends credited the accused of some pretty extravagant and crazy things. Witchcraft and Sorcery were serious crimes and as such, had both serious trial procedures and very grave consequences. The people persecuting them, Inquisitors and lead hunters were well respected and thought be to doing good work. All of Europe had Witch trials and witch hunts. (And very famously, so did Salem Massachusetts.) I am going to talk to you a little bit about how two specific countries hunted and tried those accused of maleficium.
As we heard, witches started off as scapegoats to blame a bad crop on. If your milk went bad because you forgot about it in the sun and didn’t want to take the rap, blame
In Germany, if you were accused of being a witch, you were arrested and investigated. And more likely than not, you were a witch. In Spain, you had to be accused by two independent sources and have an actual case, with rigorous evidential standards to be committed of witchcraft. Not only did the Spanish have high standards for admissible evidence but they had many stipulations that had to be met before torture could be used or applied. Germany did not. In some extreme cases, such as Hexenbischof, the Witch Bishop, the accused weren’t even allowed to defend themselves. He ordered a special prison to be built for the accused to wait until being hung. There was no chance for defense, guaranteeing the death penalty in every single case (Encyc. Unusual site). While these cases were extreme, they showcase how emotionally involved people got. In Germany, where so many of the accused was executed, 60% of those accused were killed. In Spain, you had to be fed, questioned multiple times, have two reliable accusers willing to testify, and have some sort of proof to be a candidate for torture. However, superstition was legally backed until 1936, Spain’s last legal witch burning(expatica). It had full approval of both the church and the local government; the woman had confessed to being a witch and was mercifully strangled before her body was
This can include folktales and common beliefs. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov decribes some common beliefs at Satan’s ball and Margarita’s travel arrangemetns to get there. She flies out of her house, naked and on a broom after covering herself with a special cream given to her by the devil’s assigment. As Satan’s queen, she is initially bathed in blood. She walks around naked in front of both women and men. After her refreshing blood bath, she greets all of the terrifying guests one by one. All of the male guests are clothed and have tails while the females only cover and decorate their hair. Becoming weak, she is again bathed and the blood restores her stength. Her guests dance and she watches as a head upon a plate speaks. These show what the common people, and Bulgakov in particular, had heard about witches and what they did. Many other ideas of witches and witch balls included group orgys and actually kissing the Devil’s ass. Some legends spoke of group sex and public sex with Satan. Bulgakov didn’t show all of these acts and niether did Goethe. But Goethe does show a few other common ideas. In Faust’s Walpurgisnacht, there are many naked witches dancing around a fire. They sing and dance and genrally just make noise and wreak havoc. The first witch they physically come across tries to sell them a dagger that has killed a man, a cup filled with