Doctor Johann Weyer (1515–88) and Witchcraft

Summary

Witchcraft, the exercise of supernatural powers, such as magic, sorcery, and satanism, is based on a belief in separate powers of good and evil, a conviction found in ancient pagan cults and in religions, including Gnosticism and Zoroastrianism. In the western civilizations the range, imagery, and iconography of demonology, sorcery, and witchcraft were shaped essentially by the Middle Ages. First mentioned in the Canon Episcopi (c. 900), witches were believed to fly at nighttime — an assumption condemned by the Canon. Sorceresses perverted by the Devil became part of the universe of Thomas Aquinas, who believed that evil resulted from the intervention of demons in human affairs (logic demanded that there be agents for the administration of evil). Edelgard E. DuBruck further explains that:

[b]eginning in the fifteenth century, theoretical writings of various types described, classified, and accused sorcery and witchcraft. Besides John Nider's Formicarius (c.1475), there was Peter Marmoris's Flagellum maleficorum (Lyon, 1490), Geiler von Kaysersberg's Die Ameis (Strasbourg, 1517), John Trithemius's Antipali maleficiorum libri quatuor (1605), Martin A. Del Rio's Disquisitionum magicarum (1608), and Ulrich Molitor's De lamiis (Strasbourg, 1489), to name but a few.

The monotheistic Christian Church persecuted witches from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century: under the Spanish Inquisition, up to 100 alleged witches were burned in a day; in 1692, twenty persons were executed as witches in Salem, Massachusetts. In this essay, I will present the first person who refuted both witchcraft and witch-persecution: Dr. Johann Weyer.

The witch hunt was sanctioned by jurists and doctors of medicine alike, and by the end of the fifteenth century, the entire western world was convinced that witches (female demons) and their dangers to humankind should be extirpated. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches, 1486) by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Krämer and J. Sprenger, and its many later editions, remained the chief guides consulted for the persecution of witches during the next two centuries. The inquisition's application of justice (then a synonym for torture) also arose in sixteenth-c. iconography; execution consisted of burning witches on the continent, of hanging them in England.