<blockquote><font color=191970>In passing, it should be noted that the English word "witchcraft" means the art and craft of the wise, from wit, to know.

To make matters worse, the Reverend Henricus Institores then succeeded in obtaining a Papal Bull, titled Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, from the newly-elected Pope Innocent VIII in Rome. Dated December 9th. 1484, this document lent the enormous politico-religious clout of the Vatican's imprimatur to an organised attempt to suppress these visionary experiences by giving the Holy Inquisition against so-called "witches" an energising power and an authority which it had never enjoyed before. People got their metaphors mixed up and mistook the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. Not only was it declared a mortal sin for witches to "fly" through the sky with the Pagan Goddess Diana (in the external sense of flying), it was also a heresy – punishable by torture and death – not to believe that witches really flew!

The dream had become real. People became hysterical. The book received an Official Letter of Approbation from the Faculty of Theology at the University of Köln in 1487, and was immediately followed by a series of excommunications, including that of the great Florentine humanist Pico della Mirandola, the first Christian philosopher to profess the universality of all religions. The Vatican appointed a notorious Spanish sadist, Tomás de Torquemada, to the post of Grand Inquisitor.

The Malleus Maleficarum became the official textbook of the campaign, and was a best-seller for the next two hundred years. It was republished in thirteen editions up to 1520, followed by sixteen more between 1574 and 1669.

[...]

Mystics, midwives, medicine-women, herbalists, healers, moon-worshipers, virgins, and simple-minded girls – along with the occasional troublesome mistress and mother-in-law – were rounded up by the thousands, and brought to the Inquisitor in chains. But it didn't stop there. Children, too, were killed. At Würtzburg the child victims included boys of ten and eleven, two twelve-year old choirboys, "a boy of twelve years old in one of the lower forms of the school, the two young sons of the Prince's cook, the eldest fourteen, the younger twelve years old, and several pages and seminarists." An unknown number of girls were also condemned, including "a child of nine years old and her little sister." Our little best-seller includes a list of titillating techniques with which to reveal the true allegiance of these women and children by forced "confession" under torture, prior to being burned alive at the stake.

It should be emphasised that the extraordinary cruelty which the Church used in this crusade against women must rank amongst the most bloodthirsty spectacles in all recorded history, outstripping even the Nazi holocaust in its exhibition of brutality. At least the Nazis felt enough shame that they concealed their atrocities from public scrutiny behind the barbed wire fences of remote concentration camps. This Christian holocaust however, was carried out in public, across the town squares of Europe, before the eyes and ears of the assembled citizens who were exhorted to attend. Having first stripped, starved, beaten, tortured and no doubt sexually molested their prey for days on end, our holy fathers then staged the sort of Kafkaesque trials in which the guilt of the accused is a foregone conclusion. The recent ancestors of present-day Americans and Europeans then burned alive an estimated six hundred thousand to two million women between 1350 and 1750. [...] The Church, of course, did not restrict this practice to Europe, but inflicted its terror also upon the Indigenous Peoples in the colonies, especially in the Americans and Africa. One has to ask who really was "possessed by the Devil?" The fact that this ethnic cleansing of the Old Religion has all been conveniently forgotten only goes to show how much we are still suffering from its psychological consequences. The Church has, as far as I know, has never really admitted its mistake, apologised, or restituted the lands, buildings, and other properties that were confiscated to the families of the victims.

From a psychological viewpoint, it is important to bear in mind that this mass brutality was carried out by human beings so unaware of their own motives that they could hypocritically justify this final solution as a pure and holy act, performed in the service of God, with the complete sanction of a religion whose official mottoes were to "Love thy neighbour" and "Do as you would be done by!" Such insane violence is a classical example of what can happen all too easily when a culture which has lost touch with its psychological roots suddenly experiences a flurry of visionary states. People take the visions literally, panic, and all Hell breaks loose.

Source: When the Dream Becomes Real</font></blockquote>