Witch Trials and the Burning Times: History vs. Myth

The European witch trials represent one of the most sustained episodes of judicial violence in Western history, spanning roughly four centuries from the early fifteenth century through the mid-eighteenth, producing tens of thousands of executions and an incalculable weight of suffering in accused individuals and their communities. For contemporary witchcraft and pagan practitioners, this history carries deep personal meaning. It is therefore especially important to engage with what the historical record actually shows rather than with the mythologized version that circulated widely in twentieth-century neo-pagan writing.

The documented history is terrible enough. People, predominantly but not exclusively women, were subjected to accusation, imprisonment, torture, and execution on charges that were literally impossible: attending night flights to sabbaths, having sexual congress with the Devil, murdering children for their fat to make magical unguents. The trials destroyed individuals, families, and communities. Understanding what actually happened, who was targeted, and why the panics occurred when and where they did, serves both honest historical knowledge and the dignity of those who suffered.

History and origins

Witch beliefs existed in European folk culture throughout the medieval period and took many forms: cunning folk who offered magical services, feared witches who caused harm to neighbors and livestock through maleficium, and older traditions involving spirits of the dead and other supernatural beings. These popular beliefs were not, however, identical to the learned witch-theory that drove the trials.

The systematized demonological theory of witchcraft, which held that witches had made explicit pacts with the Devil, attended nocturnal sabbaths where they renounced Christianity and participated in obscene rites, and formed an organized anti-church threatening Christian society, was largely a construction of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, developed in learned and ecclesiastical culture. The Malleus Maleficarum, published by Heinrich Kramer in 1486 and at various times attributed also to Jacob Sprenger (a attribution now disputed), synthesized this theory and argued strenuously that witchcraft was real, serious, and required aggressive prosecution. It was widely read and reprinted but is not, as sometimes claimed, the primary cause of the trials; its influence was greatest in some regions and periods and minimal in others.

The great trial panics that produced the highest death tolls occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, particularly in the Holy Roman Empire, Scotland, and parts of France. These were often cascade panics: a few initial accusals led to arrests, torture produced confessions and the naming of accomplices, the named accomplices were arrested and tortured to name further accomplices, and the resulting wave of accusations could destroy an entire community before it collapsed or was suppressed by higher authority.

The Burning Times myth

The concept of the “Burning Times” as used in neo-pagan and Wiccan writing from the 1970s onward referred to a supposed nine-million-victim genocide of practitioners of a pre-Christian goddess religion. This figure derived from a nineteenth-century German feminist and freethinker named Gottfried Christian Voigt by way of the American suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who used it in her 1893 book Woman, Church, and State. The figure had no archival basis; it was a polemical estimate, not a historical calculation.

Margaret Murray, a British Egyptologist who developed the witch-cult theory in her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, argued that those accused in the trials were genuine practitioners of an organized pre-Christian fertility religion. Murray’s theory was accepted by many in the mid-twentieth century and directly influenced Gerald Gardner’s construction of Wicca, which claimed to be a survival of the religion Murray described. Scholars of European history, including Norman Cohn and Keith Thomas, had effectively refuted Murray’s thesis by the 1970s, though it continued to circulate in popular witchcraft writing.

The historical reality is that there was no organized pre-Christian religion among those accused. The accused were overwhelmingly ordinary people caught in extraordinary and often arbitrary circumstances.

Why historical accuracy matters

Some practitioners resist the scholarly corrections to the Burning Times narrative, feeling that it diminishes the spiritual or political significance of the witch trials for contemporary witches. The better position is that the documented history, forty thousand to sixty thousand actual human beings tortured and killed, is both more historically honest and more genuinely honoring of those who suffered than an inflated figure that can be dismissed as myth. The trials targeted vulnerability, social marginality, and the disruption of social order, not organized magical practice. That history speaks to contemporary concerns about whose bodies and practices are regulated and criminalized.

Legacy

European witch trial scholarship has matured significantly since the 1970s, producing careful regional studies that map the actual distribution of trials, identify the social dynamics of specific panics, and assess the roles of both popular accusation and learned demonology. Historians including Brian Levack, Wolfgang Behringer, and Robin Briggs have produced accessible accounts that practitioners engaging with this history will find more illuminating than the older mythological framework.

Understanding the actual history does not diminish the significance of the witch trial period for contemporary witchcraft communities. It is, if anything, a more challenging and meaningful history than the simplified version, because it implicates real social forces that have not disappeared.