Protestant View of the Spanish Inquisition
Perhaps for the first time in 1567 a protestant image of the Spanish Inquisition was made generally available by the publication of a book titled Santae Inquisitiones Hispaniae Artes, written under the pseudonym of Montanus by two Spanish protestant exiles, giving a “full description of the functioning of the Inquisition and its persecution of Protestants in Spain.”395
Later in a nineteenth century edition of Foxes Book of Martyrs, Rev. Ingram Cobbin, M.A. added the description of what French troops of liberation during the 1808 Napoleonic Wars found in “the secret cells of the tribunal (Inquisition) in Madrid”:
There they found the instruments of torture, of every kind which the ingenuity of men or devils could invent. The first instrument noticed was a machine by which the victim was confined and then, beginning with the fingers, all joints in the hands, arms and body were broken and drawn one after another, until the sufferer died. The second (was the water torture). The third was an infernal machine, laid horizontally, on which the victim was bound; the machine then being placed between two scores of knives so fixed that by turning the machine with a crank the flesh of the sufferer was all torn from his limbs into small pieces. The fourth surpassed the others in fiendish ingenuity. Its exterior was a large doll, richly dressed and having the appearance of a beautiful woman with her arms extended ready to embrace her victim. A semicircle was drawn around her, and the person who passed over this fatal mark touched a spring which caused the diabolical engine to open, its arms immediately clasped him, and a thousand knives cut him in as many pieces.396
Can it still be maintained that torture was not punishment?
Finally, in 1855, John Motley’s book The Rise of the Dutch Republic stated that in the Spanish Inquisition:
Torture took place at midnight, in a gloomy dungeon, dimly lighted by torches. The victim – whether man, matron or tender virgin – was stripped naked and stretched upon the wooden bench. Water, weights, pulleys, fires, screws – all the apparatus by which sinews could be strained without cracking … and the body racked … without giving up the ghost – was now put into operation. The executioner, enveloped in a black robe from head to toe … practiced successively all the forms of torture which the devilish ingenuity of the monk had invented. The imagination sickens when striving to keep pace with these dreadful realities.397
In the 1720’s, the Spanish Inquisition issued a new wave of persecutions against conversos, though it is amazing that any had survived the previous centuries. But, between 1721 and 1725, sixty-six autos de fe were held, more than one per month. Portuguese immigrants accused of judaising made up 80% of cases. Records show that between 1660 and 1720, two thousand two hundred were prosecuted, resulting in 8% burnt and 905 people imprisoned. What happened to the rest? No one says. And, as a last gasp of evil, five thousand cases were tried by the Inquisition in the forty years between 1780 and 1820 even after the office was supposed to have been closed in 1808 by the French invasion. But by then, the Jews were no longer a presence in Spain.398
As might be imagined, the Inquisition was hostile to the Enlightenment movement on the Continent. Following the French Revolution, in 1808 French forces closed the Holy Office in December of that year. And, on February 13, 1813, the French decreed the abolition of the Inquisition. Several attempts were made to revive it, but on July 15, 1834, the government of Queen Isabella II issued the final decree of suppression, and the Spanish Inquisition finally came to its legal end. By a stroke of great misfortune, the legal demise of the Spanish Inquisition did not exterminate its lethal legacy. Limpieza, the policy of racial pure blood, continued to spill its venom over the European continent, culminating in the Nazi policies of World War II.
Kamen writes that
The political right wing in 19th century Spain and Europe adopted the Jew as its prototype enemy, sometimes distinct from and sometimes identical with the freemason. The Jew, who had now become a myth and no more, became identified in certain minds with all that was hostile to the tradition represented by the Inquisition. To be a Jew meant not being a Catholic, therefore not to be a Catholic meant being a Jew: one result of this popular (Spanish) reasoning meant that “Jews and freemasons” or “Jews and Protestants” and “Jews and foreigners” became self-explanatory identifications. In the constant struggle waged by the right wing to preserve Catholic Spain, all that was hostile and sinister became personified in the Jew who was on the other side. The aberrations of the nineteenth century found their last heyday in the racist literature circulated in Spain during the Second World War.399
Less than one hundred years after the reign of Queen Isabella II abolished the Inquisition of Spain, Hitler who was born a German Catholic took the policy of limpieza or “pure blood” and turned it into the Holocaust. If the people of European continent and those in the United States had paid attention to the legacy of the Inquisition and its pernicious policy of limpieza, practiced for so long and of such great influence to all Spanish institutions, would the holocaust have been recognized in enough time to prevent it?
Is ignorance ever bliss?
OLD NATURE RELIGION AND THE RITUAL POWER OF WOMEN
Ritual power, magic, shamanism, the Old Nature Religion, all join to form an underlying basis for asserting powerfulness and endeavoring to heal people or situations, which arise and for which help is beyond the skill of the ordinary person. At this time, the powerfulness applies particularly to women, from whom most other powers had been taken by the rules and regulations of the societies in which she lived. Every clan and region across Europe (as elsewhere) had their own forms of ritual power. Whether one sees that from the vantage point of today as either magic or religion is largely a matter of how either is defined.
In Ancient Christian Magic, Coptic Texts of Ritual Power the editors say that “What has been labeled magic is often regarded or defined by the culture using it as something that has been given, sanctioned, approved, established by the god(s) or the divine realm, and a rightful and necessary part of the proper, divine, natural social order.”400 In this same book, the texts are by Coptic Christians from ancient and early medieval Egypt, dating from the first (through late Roman and into early Byzantine centuries) to the eleventh or twelfth century CE. The authors agree that “Rituals have a social function and they take place within a social structure … rituals can be discussed in terms of empowerment or power relations … duties are summoned … but the ritualist accomplishes … by the power of some greater figure.”401 Concerns evidenced by the texts included love charms and sex protection from dangerous people, evil influence, disease, blindness, dangerous animals (scorpions, snakes, crocodiles), and then assistance to women and children along with administration of medicine and healing.
The term “Gnostic” refers to
a series of groups which developed in the very early Christian era, the most radically dualists of the ancient cults of salvation … most scholars now agree, among the many Jewish sects that flourished around the Mediterranean Diaspora communities. (i.e. their expulsion from Jerusalem in the first century) As a Jewish sect in the first century, Gnosticism developed fantastic myths to portray a world filled with evil and alienation. Rejecting the creator-god of the Jewish Scriptures as a wicked ruler responsible for this world, the myths proposed a more remote and spiritual God beyond this cosmos.402
The Gnostic sects (Sethian and Valentinian) were often “accused of practicing magic, engaging in rituals intended to manipulate heavenly powers.”403
These Gnostics, described by the Gospel of Philip from the Nag Hammadi scrolls, developed a five-stage ritual of initiation, somewhat similar to the orthodox sacraments of the Church of Rome, culminating with a mystical union within the bridal chamber, more reminiscent of the sacred marriage union with the Goddess. Perhaps this was a combination of both, borrowing from each belief system in order to form one of their own that satisfied the needs of their people. Their baptism was of a three-fold nat
ure: fire, water and holy spirit. Throughout, the use of botanicals is specified, and included in the texts are elaborate drawings with phrases for incantation with the number of times that they are to be repeated.
“Magic as an aid to love and for the pursuit of sexual pleasure is a cross-cultural phenomenon – a testimony to the intensity of emotions and the perennial problems that love and sex have always entailed … one surely gets the impression that love magic was a constant factor in the social and sexual landscape of late antiquity.”404 In one spell which said that the intended lover “will draw her robe to her neck, and she shall call out to me ‘come here’,” may actually be from the Goddess culture before the Coptic movement in Egypt. Ancient historian Herodotus reports how women on the ceremonial barges during the festival of Bastel “pull up their dresses” while being steered toward villages along the Nile. The writer Diodorus Sicules describes women pulling up their dresses, displaying their genitals to the new Apis bull in Memphis (on the Nile river) … in addition, terra cotta figurines in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo show the Goddess Isis in such a posture.404 All the texts show a “living Christian folklore” alive and well for one thousand years, not dependent on the Church of Rome.
To the issues of love and sex, must be added the idea of the “curse,” which is well known already through both the Old and New Testament use of it. “The religion of the Old Testament is replete with the language of cursing … and the New Testament offers examples of Jesus cursing the fig tree (Matt 21: 18–19) as well as explicit authorization for disciples to curse (Matt: 10: 11–15, Luke 9:5).”405 In fact, evidence was everywhere in the old world from palaces to cemeteries, to dispel the notion that cursing was alien to the Judeo-Christian tradition.406 It will be the power to curse that will be perhaps best remembered, and the curse of the Mother will be the most feared of all. It is here that almost universal belief in the power of women to curse will be turned back on them during the times of the Inquisition. And, in the upside-down way in which the patriarchy took issues central to womanhood and demonized them, the very aspect that made a woman most connected to the moon and the Goddess, namely her monthly menses or bleeding, her time of ultimate power because of that connection with the universe, was later called “the curse,” portrayed with disgust or filth, and used against women instead of being recognized as the miraculous life-giving force.
There were the ritual handbooks inscribed on leather, paper or papyrus.
In a world where ritual dominated the resolution of most crisis in life, these handbooks seem to have been an prized component of private collections and the mainstay of temple libraries … in the broadest sense it would seem that the ritual handbook was a function of literacy itself and of the encyclopedism, the penchant for collecting and compiling, that characterized late antique religious literature … the catalogs of Egyptian temple libraries disclose substantial collections of spells for everything from festival processions to gynecological aliments.407
There was evidence in these handbooks that a syncretism of Christian, Jewish and native Egyptian spells, amulets, even curses had taken place during the early Roman times, and that different language usage applied to the rituals used in different villages outside the Monasteries. It also may imply that monks recently converted to Gnosticism from the Jewish Temple culture helped to facilitate these exchanges. Most importantly, it may indicate that a “neglect of Christian traditions might suggest that the handbook owners worked independently from the monasteries, it may also reflect the type of language and symbolisms that worked in the villages beyond the monasteries.”408 It tells us nothing about women who may have been engaged in the practice of ritual power in Egypt at this time, but it does not preclude them. Chances are that they were practicing in the villages along the Nile, bringing forward their knowledge of Isis, Hathor and the older religion here, just as they were doing everywhere else where there are records which mention women. Neither the men nor the women were reliant on Rome in these communities, but all utilized their knowledge, whether written in the handbooks or transmitted through the more widely practiced spoken traditions, to serve the people.
Earlier chapters have introduced the ritual power of the Runes, a powerful magic used in Northern Europe during the Dark Ages among peoples still free to practice their Old Religion’s customs and traditions. Runes were materials such as wood, stone metal with spells or chants hand-carved into them by rune makers, often women. Casting runes was a means of divination, the very skill for which women had always proved particularly talented. Concurrent with the use of Runes, and probably also with Gnostic rituals, was native European shamanism. Shamanism takes place in ritual trance states, called non-ordinary reality, where information from the beyond including herbal and spiritual healing are brought back with the shaman and transmitted to the person or group requiring assistance. Both women and men practiced, and most were either born into families with long shamanic traditions or were chosen through their miraculous survival of otherwise fatal circumstances.
“Common Germanic” and Anglo-Saxon Runes
Zsuzanna Budapest, Hungarian author of the Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries, has first-hand knowledge of the work of the shamans, because she, her mother and many other female relatives in Hungary participated over generations. She writes
Before white people were Christianized, before Europe was taken by the sword of the great Byzantine Empire, before Rome extended its imperial grasp around Western Europe, white people followed a native European nature religion. White people worshiped Life and the elements of nature; they prophesied by the birds and the winds; they practiced rune magic. Most significantly, they used song and dance as magical tools … they used song to gain the love of a man or woman … they danced to invoke the favors of the earth for healthy crops and children.… they used music to commune with the ancestor spirits.409
In this old religion, shamans were both male and female, but with different missions. Men fought duels and shape-shifted to win battles, but never killed, because the “fatally wounded” was reborn though his ability to travel back and forth between earthly regions and the land of the dead. Women were herbalists and healers, living on the edge of the community in spirit houses, where they prayed to the great Mother Bear, the Heaven’s Queen, Chief Woman, or Grandmother-on-the-Moon.
Spirit women from the great plains, mountains and rivers of Europe maintained tribal unity, happiness and wealth. There was rarely more than one shaman per tribe. It was a very special position, supported by the entire community. The relationship between shaman and people was not as it is today between clergy and parish. The shamans were not rich. They were responsible for the weather, the bounty of the hunt, the health of babies, the culture of the people, the dances and songs, the shaman drums and wolf lyras (made from five strings of gray wolves intestines) and when the lyra was played, people and animals were healed.410
When shamans worked for the people, they carried their spirit wand, and climbed the steps of the sacred tree to the spirit world in a deep trance. Female shamans wore a crown of wildflowers, herbs and feathers. Male shamans wore a headdress of bones, animal heads, feathers and branches.411 Weather work was always a concern for the shamans, and in fact the female shaman’s community esteem evolved out of her ability, with the help of spirits, to make rain. From ancient Neolithic times when women created agriculture, the yearly growing of seasonal crops, rainmaking always figured prominently in the agricultural matriarchies for the continence of the people in health and abundance. And female shaman’s weather work was an underlying spiritual practice, along with her knowledge of healing, that connected the continental Europeans in a continuous flow from the Goddess Neolithic.
Magic and the Middle Ages
A discussion of magic in this present context should not be equated with party entertainment or passing curiosity or for audience amusement, as may be the case today.
Richard Kieckhefer in his work titled Magic in the Middle Ages, makes the bridge betw
een the Old Nature Religion shamanism and the magic against which a new wave of Inquisition terror was about to erupt. He writes, “Magic is a crossing-point where religion converges with science, popular beliefs interact with those of the educated classes and the conventions of fiction meet with the realities of life.”412 But magic was condemned by both church and state, so it will be necessary to see why and for what reasons. Again, we turn to Kieckhefer who says, “Magical belief and practices from the classical culture of the Mediterranean regions mingled with beliefs and practices of Germanic and Celtic peoples from northern Europe. Later on, Christians borrowed notions about magic from the Jews in their midst or from Muslims abroad.”413
The term magic comes from classical times and was initially intended to describe the arts of the Zoroastrian Persian priests called the magi. They were first known to the Greeks by the fifth century BCE, then to the Mediterranean world as they traveled, practicing astrology and healing. “Because the magi were foreigners with exotic skills that aroused apprehension, the term magic was a deeply emotional one, rich with dark connotation.”414 The wonder workers of this world were foretelling the future and healing diseases with help from their gods, as the native population of priestesses following the goddess were also doing simultaneously.
But to the early Christians, the pagan gods were not deities but demons, and, therefore, anything emanating from this work was labeled demonic. The most famous church writer on this subject and from whose works on the subject later generations drew verbatim was Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354–430 CE). In his classic work the City of God, he saw demonic involvement in the foundation of magic, demons who taught the arts to humans and demons who actually performed the work. In addition, Augustine proclaims that the most ancient and overwhelmingly female art of divination was possible only with the aid of demons. And, “Augustine’s authority in medieval culture was so great that on this issue, as on many others, his outlook prevailed.”415
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