robin morgan

THE BURNING TIME


Historical Notes
by Robin Morgan

The Burning Time is based on historical fact. The story of Alyce Kyteler and her circle comes to us from records of the time as a remarkable example of three primary elements always found in witch persecutions: the attempt by a conqueror’s religion to colonize, demonize, and eradicate older, indigenous belief systems; economic motive, since the accuser profits by being awarded the accused’s properties; and misogyny--fear and hatred of the female.

Christianity’s arrival in Ireland in approximately the fourth century C.E. gave rise to a unique Celtic Christianity: a syncretic mix of Roman Catholicism with indigenous Pagan beliefs practiced by the majority of people calling themselves Christians. This was not uncommon throughout the British Isles; as late as the early fourteenth century, the Bishop of Coventry openly admitted to being an observer of the Old Religion, or The Craft. In Ireland, this joining of early Christian and ancient Pagan symbolism enriched the artistic and cultural traditions, producing, for example, the eighth century’s magnificently illuminated Book of Kells, today enshrined at Trinity College Library in Dublin.

Consequently, it was considered shocking when, in 1324, Dame Alyce Kyteler (sometimes written as Kettler or Kettle) of County Kilkenny was charged with heretical sorcery--the first person in Ireland to be persecuted as an observer of The Craft. Formal charges were brought by Bishop Richard de Ledrede, an Englishman ordained as a Franciscan. He arrived in Ireland from the Papal Court--based in Avignon, France from 1309 to 1378--with the blessings of Pope John XXII. (This period was followed by The Great Schism, with competing papacies in Rome, Avignon, and Pisa, until 1417). John XXII was author of papal bulls commissioning inquisitional campaigns against sorcery; he also declared St. Francis’s doctrine of Christ’s poverty to be heretical. Bishop de Ledrede’s mission was to ferret out witchcraft in Ireland using Inquisition procedures--including torture to exact confessions and the naming of others--that were already in use on the continent of Europe.

An aside is necessary: “The Inquisition” is a misnomer. There were actually three Inquisitions.

• In 1233, Pope Gregory IX established a Papal Inquisition to investigate and combat heresy; its original targets were the Albigensions or Cathars and such sects as the Knights Templar, but it became known as the Medieval Inquisition since it expanded its mandate to include sorcery and witchcraft. By 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII launched his own war against Satan, the Medieval Inquisition was well established, its power so great as to overrule local courts and secular law throughout Europe.

• In 1542, Pope Paul III delegated the Medieval Inquisition to the Congregation of the Inquisition or the Holy Office (in the modern-day Vatican diplomatically renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), and this became known as the Roman Inquisition; it primarily persecuted Protestants and earned history’s ridicule for having condemned Galileo.

• Last, the Spanish Inquisition, infamous for its autos-da-fé, was established in 1478 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with the approval of Pope Sixtus IV. Its purpose was to expose and punish Jews and Muslims, force their conversions, and monitor them closely for recurring heresy, executing them if they were considered to have lapsed. The Spanish Inquisition was formally abolished as late as 1834.

All three Inquisitions share one commonality: women, girls, and some men--largely but not exclusively peasants--were consistently accused, tortured, tried, and executed for “witchcraft” throughout.

The peasants were mostly helpless. Alyce Kyteler was not. Rich and well-connected, she is referred to in the records as a “domina dives” (wealthy noblewoman). She had been widowed three times (William Outlawe, Adam le Blound, and Richard de Valle), and her current husband, Sir John le Poer, was in ill health. He accused her of poisoning him, and found a ready ally in the Bishop, who charged Lady Alyce with seven indictments. (The charges listed in Chapter VII accurately reflect these; indictment number four, for example, was that she and her followers “parodied religious ceremonies, saying ‘Fie, fie, fie, amen!’”).

Kyteler and the Bishop engaged in quite a personal war. She was powerful enough to defy him, so he excommunicated her. She then had him imprisoned by reviving an unsettled charge of his having previously defrauded a widowed parishioner. He retaliated from prison by placing the entire diocese under interdict, but this illegal ban was lifted by highly placed friends of Lady Alyce. Her supporters included the Lord Justice of Ireland; the Seneschal (Mayor) of Kilkenny, on record as having denounced the Bishop as a “vile, rustic, interloping priest”; the Archbishop of Dublin, who publicly declared de Ledrede “a truant monk from England”; and even King Edward II and the Crown Prince (later Edward III) of England. Nevertheless, with the Pope’s support, the Bishop persevered, finally convening an Ecclesiastical Court to condemn her.

Lady Alyce was eventually forced to flee to England. There she was befriended by Edward III, who ascended the throne in 1327 and was himself interested in The Craft; Edward passed antipapal and anticlerical statutes, in 1366 abolishing Peter’s Pence, the tax paid to the papacy by every house in England. Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Dublin brought a charge of heresy against Richard de Ledrede, who fled to Avignon to seek the Pope’s protection. In 1329, Edward III seized the Bishop’s revenues, and de Ledrede didn’t return to England until 1348. But he remained under ostracism until 1354, and six years later he died in disgrace.

Of those accused with Kyteler (see below), some were killed, some whipped through the streets to the marketplace where crosses were burned into the remains of their flesh, some banished and sentenced in absentia to excommunication--which probably means they had already escaped.

The fates of only two are known for certain.

William Oultawe, Alyce Kyteler’s son by her first husband, was imprisoned for nine weeks and fined. He was then allowed to recant and receive Church sacraments, on condition that he make a pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, and pay for the re-roofing in lead of St. Canice’s--today called St. Mary’s--Cathedral in Kilkenny Town. (Modern Kilkenny residents still wink at the witchly irony that this penance caused the too-heavy roof to cave in, as described in Chapter XVII.)

The records also show that Petronilla de Meath, a member of the Kyteler household, was flogged six times. She confessed to sorcery and all charges of the Bishop’s court. Once certain that Kyteler had made a successful escape together with de Meath’s daughter Sara (sometimes listed in the records as Sara Basilia), she named Kyteler--but only Kyteler--as an accomplice. Refusing to name any others, she scorned the sacraments of the Church, and was declared apostate, excommunicate, and damned. She was burned alive at the stake in the marketplace of Kilkenny Town on November 3, 1324.

Petronilla de Meath was the first person ever to be executed for witchcraft in Ireland. With her death, the Wiccans of Eire knew that The Burning Time had arrived in the land of The Old Ways.

The Burning Time in continental Europe and the British Isles lasted approximately 600 years, peaking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but persisting well into the eighteenth century and the “Enlightenment”; eventually, as exorcism became more fashionable, executions declined in frequency. In Ireland the last witch trial was held in 1711, in England in 1717. But in Germany the last person accused of witchcraft was executed in 1775, in Spain 1781, in Protestant Switzerland 1782. Catholic Poland burned alive its last witch as late as 1793 (the year George Washington held his first cabinet meeting). In an act of long-delayed justice, on October 31, 2004, Prestonpans Township in Scotland pardoned 81 people (and their cats) who had been executed for witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the last execution in Scotland was in 1727. More than 3,500 Scots and their pet cats were condemned to death on the evidence of owning (or being) a black cat. The twenty-first century pardons were sanctioned by the fourteenth baron of the township, Gordon Prestoungrange.

Clearly, the papacy was not alone in mounting and sustaining these persecutions. Indeed, ideological-political battles raging between the Reformation and Counter Reformation literally fed the flames, with newly minted Protestants competing with Catholics for the most extreme fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. Luther declared that all witches should be burnt merely for making pacts with the devil, even if they did no harm thereby. Calvin preached that “God expressly commands all witches and enchantresses be put to death, and this law of God is a universal law.”

Europe’s witch purges gave rise to new, persecutory professions, one such being witchfinding. Witchfinders would charge handsome fees as they traveled from town to town, searching out prey. Their techniques included listening to all rumours and accusations; looking for “devil’s marks” (moles, warts, or darker-than-”normal” skin); and searching the accused’s home for evidence of cats, herbs, or books. Also commonly employed was the self-fulfilling trial by ordeal--usually that of water. In this procedure, an accused witch was forced to a kneeling position, bound that way with ropes, and tossed into a river or lake; if she floated, she was pronounced a witch and would then be burned; if she drowned, she was declared innocent--posthumously. Watching such trials by ordeal became a popular entertainment. So did attendance--complete with picnics, jugglers, peddlers, and spectator crowds--at witch burnings.

The concept that a pact with Satan was inherent in all magic or heresy actually came later in the witch persecutions, and was applied first in Ireland and Sweden, where indigenous faiths were deep-rooted and thus required demonizing by the colonizers. Earlier European records show accusations and executions--by hanging, boiling alive, crushing with stones, and burning at the stake--for more commonplace political-cultural rebellions: wives “guilty of treason against their husbands,” “sodomites,” “midwives,” and “misbelievers.” But once the idea was afoot that heresy resulted from a Satanic pact, it became dogma and spread swiftly, culminating in the 1486 publication of the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch Hammer), written by two Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, from Germany and Holland, respectively.

The Malleus became the handbook that defined witchcraft (“All witchcraft comes from lust, which in women is insatiable”), and formally institutionalized such practices as witchfinding, interrogative torture, and various exceptionally sadistic means of execution. For the next three centuries, the Malleus was the irrefutable, final authority on the subject, and became accepted not only by Catholic hierarchy but by Protestant legislatures as well. [One Protestant cleric, however, decided that Lutherans needed their own handbook. In 1635, Benedict Carpzov published his lifework, Practica Rerum Criminalium, a treatise on how to find and try witches. His book became “the Malleus of Lutheranism,” and he “would live to a ripe old age and look back on a meritorious life in the course of which he had read the Bible from cover to cover fifty-three times, taken the sacrament every week, greatly intensified the methods and efficacy of torture, and procured the death of 20,000 persons.” (H.R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch Craze, p. 159).]

Meanwhile, A well-thumbed copy of the Malleus sat on the desk of every Christian church official, as well as on the desk of every secular magistrate and judge. Naturally, the more that people were accused and tortured, the more they confessed, whether they knew anything about The Craft or not. Consequently, paranoia that witches must be everywhere increased, as did campaigns to eradicate them.

The result was widespread slaughter. A short sampling: in 1482, in Constance, France, 48 women were burned; in 1507, in Calahorra, Spain, 30 were burned; in 1515, in Geneva, Switzerland, 500 accused witches were executed in a single day; in 1524, in Como, Italy, 1000 were killed; in 1622, in Würzburg, Germany, 900; in 1670, in Mohra, Sweden, 70 women and 15 children were executed and 136 other children between the ages of nine and 16 were sentenced to be whipped together at the church door every day for a year. In Germany, the sixteenth century saw witch burnings almost every day; complete villages were “cleansed” of women, girls, and cats. In 1586, only two women were reported left alive in an entire Rhineland district. Whole convents were indicted and sentenced for harboring “rebellious, learned women.” The children of victims were especially suspect, suffering incredible cruelties: as late as 1754, Veronica Zerritsch of Germany was compelled to dance in the warm ashes of her executed mother, then was burned alive herself, at age thirteen.

Some scholars, focusing on the continental persecutions between 1550 and 1650, conservatively estimate the number hanged or burned at 60,000. Other scholars, charting the entire span of The Burning Time across Europe--600 years--estimate that between eight and nine million persons were massacred. It is impossible to know for certain. We do know, however, that although men were also accused, tortured, and killed, the vast majority of victims were women and girls.

The New World’s seventeenth-century witch trials in Salem and Danvers, Massachusetts were different, though related. As usual, fanatic religiosity (Puritan Protestantism, in this case), economic motive (acquisition by accusation), and misogyny were present. But here, racism was a further factor: charges originally focused on the alleged spiritual practices of Tituba, an enslaved woman of Native American or African descent. Another factor may have been mass hysteria in a group of girls suffering intense sexual repression. Some scholars believe that the intensely violent Indian wars being fought just northeast of Salem were a terrifying, contributing factor to the witch furor; others think that ingested fungus-infested rye, causing hallucinations, was a factor. Certainly none of the accused were actually Pagan or Wiccan; in fact, most were devout Christians. Only Tituba may have been practicing a form of indigenous worship. Nevertheless, 20 women and men were tortured and put to death by hanging, in 1692. Justice has crept slowly for them. In 1711, more than 20 years after the trials, the accused were formally cleared as a group (not individually by name), and their relatives were offered retribution. But the smell of fear was still acrid, so few families dared come forward to accept the apology. In 1957, it took a state resolution to exonerate another victim, Ann Pudeator, together with a list of “certain other persons” unnamed. It was not until Halloween (Samhain), October 31, 2001--more than three centuries after theyhad been accused, tortured, tried, and hanged as witches on Gallows Hill, that those “other persons” were officially exonerated by the state of Massachusetts: Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Alyce Parker, Wilmot Redd, and Margaret Scott. A number of their descendants were present, including the eighth great-granddaughter of Susanna Martin, who had been denounced by the Puritan leader Cotton Mather as one of the most “impudent, scurrilous, wicked creatures in the world.” Sara Wildes, cleared in 1711, was represented by her descendant Sharon Tirone, attending with her husband, State Representative Paul E. Tirone, who had backed the bill in the Massachusetts State Legislature.

Today--indeed, since the middle of the twentieth century--we are seeing a revival of nature-based, neo-Pagan interest and practice, particularly in North America and Europe. Sometimes this revival has been part of an atheistic or agnostic metaphysics. Sometimes it has been a reflection of new respect for indigenous peoples’ belief systems, although that can also be problematic, naive, and unwittingly invasive. Sometimes it allies itself with what some term Aquarian Age spirituality and progressive politics. [In 2003, England’s newly enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, was forced to reject charges of paganism after being made an honorary Druid for his contributions to the Welsh language and culture, and because of his public statements against war, poverty, bigotry, and commercial greed (“Archbishop of Canterbury Enthroned,” by Warren Hoge, The New York Times, February 28, 2003).]

Sometimes--particularly when Wiccan—the re-emergence is connected with the resurgence of the global feminist movement, as women unearth the buried history of female rebellion. The trend seems to be increasing. Most Wiccan practice remains quietly underground, but some neo-Pagans are seeking mainstream recognition for their faith, and some Wiccan representatives are achieving acceptance as invited participants at major international ecumenical religious conferences.

Nevertheless, religious fundamentalisms are also on the rise. Village murders of people accused of witchcraft and sorcery (usually for practicing traditional medicine and midwifery) have been increasing in parts of Asia, South America, and Africa--almost always preceded by incursions from fundamentalist Christian missionaries, usually from North America. For example, after the Congo war and murder of Laurent Kabila in 2001, a major witch craze seized Kinshasa: a fanatic witch-purging movement, nurtured by evangelical churches, became so powerful that child witches were soon confessing publicly to having had orgies with demons. In South Africa’s Northern Province, there were almost 400 killings of suspected witches between 1985 and 1995--accompanied by a rapid growth in the power of charismatic Christian churches. The murders range from stoning, hanging, and beating to “necklacing”--placing a gasoline-filled rubber tire around the victim’s neck and setting it aflame. The victims are almost always female. (Witchcraft, Power, and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld, by Isak Neihaus, Eliazaar Mohlala, and Kally Shokane. London: Pluto, 2001.)

A few final notes on fact and fiction in The Burning Time.

The Song of Amorgin quoted in Chapter VI dates back to 1268 C.E.; this version is, according to Robert Graves, an English translation from the colloquial Irish, itself translated from the Old Goidelic. The Song of The Running Seasons in Chapter VII is a variant of a shape-shifting lay dating at least to the eleventh century, in turn based on a theme prevalent in classical Greek poetry; a modern English version survives as The Ballad of The Coal Black Smith.

The advice quoted in Chapter XII--Wiccan guidelines for secrecy, ways to survive interrogation and torture, even endure death by fire—is authentic. The text has been passed down for centuries, and is thought to have originated in a European country in the grip of witch persecutions. The guidelines are quoted in numerous works, including those of Gerald B. Gardner, the twentieth-century British scholar who founded the first serious museum on witchcraft. (See the full Bibliography of works consulted for The Burning Time elsewhere on this site.)

The various recipes and herbal medicines are accurate, drawn from the period, and based on Wiccan sources. Wiccans have always been sophisticated herbalists. For example, willow bark was used as a pain-relieving anti-inflammatory drug half a millennium before it was discovered to have the same properties as aspirin. In fact, the recipes are so effective that I have omitted proportions and, in some cases, ingredients, when a hallucinogenic or possibly dangerous mixture might result.

The two healer-women denounced by the Bishop in Chapter II--Jacqueline Felicie de Almania, and Belota--are known to us from French trial records of the day. Bernard Gui, mentioned in Chapter XIV, authored The Conduct of the Inquisition of Heretical Depravity and from 1307 to 1324 was Chief Inquisitor of Toulouse, where he condemned a long list of accused heretics.

Dana Galrussyn, Sean Fergus/Father Brendan Canice, Maeve Payn, Father Donnan, and Lady Megan are all purely fictional characters, creations of the author.

Not so the others.

In 1577, Hollinshed, in his germinal Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Ireland--Shakespeare’s historical source--wrote of the Kyteler trials. The trial record, as edited by Thomas Wright (London, The Camden Society, 1843) is, according to the medieval scholar Dr. Margaret Murray, the earliest source to give the full names of those accused:

Proceedings Against Dame Alyce Kyteler

County Kilkenny, Ireland, 1324


1. Dame Alyce Kyteler

2. Alyce, wife of Henry the Smith

3. Annota Lange

4. Eva de Brounstoun

5. Helena Galrussyn

6. Sysok Galrussyn

7. John Galrussyn

8. Robert de Bristol

9. William Outlawe

10. William Payn of Boly

11. Petronilla de Meath

12. Sara, daughter of Petronilla

13. Robin, son of Artis (“the Devil”)






R.M.

New York City
January, 2006