The Evil Witch, or the Evil Church
Modern religion paints a picture of a witch as being wicked, evil, luring the innocent into worshipping the devil, this devil being some horned half goat half-man caricature of their own invention, but what is the truth. Even the modern witch is lured into using terms like Wiccan, White witch, Hedge witch and the like. Then there are questions similar to those faced by the Church. Just as the Church believes that all priests must be male, some who lean to the occult argue that all witches must be female.
The answer to this comes from the origin of the modern word. The word, witch developed from the word wiché (feminine) and wichá (masculine). There is no gender differential and history records a number of men, as well as women, suffering inquisition and death due to accusations of witchcraft. The word witch is commonly transcribed to mean wise woman, or wise man, but the meaning relates to knowledge, specifically spiritual knowledge of the kind the Church wanted to keep hidden. A more accurate translation would be, he/she who knows.
Much of the denigration of witchcraft by the Church is centred on this meaning. The Church could charge people with simply possessing knowledge and so they needed to create an artificial story. The evil that witches are said to do is born out of the imagination of those who claim to be holy. The Church wrote countless tracts describing evil and wicked acts and tortured many to confess deeds that were thought up by priests and bishops to justify their attack on the spiritual knowledge they wished to keep supressed. The problem in these modern times is that some use witchcraft as an excuse to practice the perverted acts and deeds imagined by men that claimed to be holy and innocent.
In truth, the village witch was considered an important asset to any community. The witch acted as healer and midwife, a medicine man/woman using locally available plants and herbs to create potions, the term potion taking on its own inference. A potion is simply a medicine and while most are now mass-produced, a modern chemist will still mix a potion to treat a cough or some other infection.
As for the use of plants and herbs, many modern medicines have their origin in the plants and herbs as used by the ancient witch. Modern chemistry simply disseminates the active ingredients from these plants and creates artificial compounds based on their chemical constituents, a fact that proves the ancient witch possessed knowledge despite that they brewed a potion in a cauldron over an open fire. A cauldron was simply a common cooking implement of the day. No magic involved and no great mystery, though this does confirm their practical knowledge and should therefore, give credence to their spiritual knowledge, the knowledge the Church wished to suppress.
Witchcraft is also called the Old Religion, though I would argue that it does no conform to the principles of being a religion, but a path to spiritual knowledge, though this will have to wait for another discussion. The New Religion set out to denigrate the Old in everyway possible and while much of the Old Religion remained occult, a word simply meaning, hidden, the practising village witch was its visible face.
Part this alternative spiritual knowledge relates to what, for now, I’ll call the occult Godhead. This is described in the Gnostic Gospel the Secret Book of John and others. This is the All-Father, but not the God of Abraham and Moses, The Mother Goddess, painted by Christendom as some mysterious but male, Holy Spirit, and Son, who is Christ, but as Marcion of Siope pointed out, calls another his Father, and not the God of Moses and Abraham. The spiritual path of witchcraft goes back to Jesus and Mary Magdalene, not the Da Vinci code version, and back further to the story of Adam and Eve, though again, an alternative story that actual gives sense and meaning to the story of creation. The occult holds a complete alternative story to the one religion tries to impose, which is why they act so forcefully to suppress those that gain knowledge of the truth.
The Church set out to denigrate witchcraft because the true witch possesses some and seeks to possess more of this knowledge. To achieve this a new and hideous caricature of witchcraft needed to be invented.
Two Dominican Priests, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, wrote a book entitled The Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of the Witches. This book was intended to be a witch hunter’s textbook and it is illustrated with various forms of diabolical torture, all drawn from their own evil imaginations. These tortures involved the dislocation of joints, the breaking of bones and the crushing of feet and hands with the intention of inflicting pain without spilling blood, because to spill blood was a sin. How diabolical is that for a priest to imagine?
In the sixteenth century the German Jesuit priest Fredrich von Spee wrote: ‘The result is the same whether the witch confesses or not. If she confesses, her guilt is clear: she is executed. If she does not confess, the torture is repeated – twice, thrice, four times. In exceptional circumstances the torture is not limited in duration, severity or frequency… indeed she can never clear herself.’
Is it any wonder that an individual accused of witchcraft would confess anything even knowing it meant their death? Death would be a relief, their only relief. Nothing they say or do can result in an acquittal so confession is the only way out. Books are then published describing the practices and rituals of witchcraft, but what is confessed is based on the torturing priest’s own warped and perverted imagination, the victim being told what they are to confess. The only evil here is the evil done by the Church.
While the church and witch finders were busily torturing and executing the poor and elderly that crossed their paths, kings, queens, bishops and priests were practicing black magic and devil worship for their own wicked gratification.
Some like the Abbé (Abbot) Beccarelli, publically boasted of the ceremonies they conducted. In one he distributed small lozenges to those gathered. These lozenges were supposed to bring about a change of sex before the participants conducted an orgy. Alternatively, the Mass of St Secaire, performed in the Basque region of France, involved a death spell using water taken from a well, after first drowning an anabaptised infant in the well.
In addition, the Catholic Church readily castrated young boys to prevent their voices breaking, thus keeping them in the choir longer. Is it not incongruous that this Church, that willingly castrates young boys to maintain their singing voice, then condemns witchcraft as being evil! Even today, more priests are accused of abusing children than are practising witches!
After the death of her husband, Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henry II of France and daughter of Lorenzo de Medici, experimented in the dark arts. Along with a select group of noble courtiers she developed what is now called, the Black Mass. The Black Mass, during which the Catholic Mass was read backwards over the body of a naked girl followed by a wild orgy, is now accepted as the main ritual of Black Magic.
The book, A Pleasant Treatise of Witches published in 1673. This details accounts of Sabbat gatherings where witches arrive on their broomsticks accompanied by their imps or familiars. These come in the form of goats, sheep or dragons. These witches then strip naked and anoint their bodies before paying homage to their lord. The Devil arrives, his body glowing red and surrounded by clouds of sulphur. Yet Pope Gregory IX contradicts this description saying the devil arrives in the form of a pale dark eyed youth.
Another account states that any new recruit, or neophyte must trample on the crucifix and, according to St Hippolytus, deny the creator of heaven and earth, deny their own baptism, deny all worship given to God and cling to Satan. They then undergo their black baptism making the special act of obedience, the osculum obscoenum – the kiss to the Devil’s buttocks.
According to the Compendium Maleficarum, published in 1626, any gathering then descends into wild dancing before the witches joined in copulation, the son not sparing the mother, the brother not sparing the sister, the father not sparing the daughter; incest continued everywhere.
The Medicatio Viri Incubo Divexati, published in 1645, states that after initiation, the new witch would learn the secret of flying. Part of this secret involves the use of ‘witch ointment’ that, according to the Medicatio, included an ingredient made from the fat of murdered children.
The first recorded account of a witch coming close to flying is that of the 14th century Irish witch, Alice Kyteler, who is said to have ambled and gambled through thick and thin on her staff, though not to actually fly. Only after further torture did she confess to flying. The first documented case of a witch flying on a broom is the confession of Prior Guillaume Edelin, from St Germain-en-Laye, in 1453 after which they started to come thick, probably because witch-finders wanted to keep up with the latest fad in confessions. Note that Prior Guillaume was a man.
Based on Church lies, satanic groups such as ‘the Son’s of Midnight’, ‘The Mohocks’, ‘the Banditti and ‘the Blasters’ sprung up and flourished. Groups like the Monks of Medenham (c1752-1755) founded by Sir Francis Dashwood, better known as the Hellfire Club, focussed their activities and wild drinking and sexual abandon, using devil worship as devised by the Church, as an excuse for their debauchery. Research into these groups reveal that they included members of the Church and nobility, the very same people that put others to death under accusation of practices the invented.
The Church paints itself as holy and pure while at the same time denigrating those seeking alternative spiritual knowledge to what they proclaim. What they proclaim and the God they worship is revealed by the way they act. They cannot reason and debate because the truth is not in them, so they denigrate and lie and torture, and do the very evil they accuse others of doing.
