#4 Witch Hunts

In the days before the 24-hour cable news cycle and global satellite imaging, it was a bit harder to put your finger on why crops failed or devastating droughts crippled entire regions of Europe. So in the 17th century (to borrow as-of-then-uncoined term), it was only natural to adopt a scapegoat—a pattern that we'll see repeated many times over.

Some sociologists have, in fact, identified strong correlations between European crop failures and rises in witch hunts, trials, and executions. While incidents of witch (or sorcery) hunting can be traced as far back as the 18th century B.C. in ancient Egypt and Babylon, witch hunters really hit their stride in Western Europe in the 1600 and 1700s.

While it's hard to land on an exact head count, historians have settled on the total number of witch-trial-related executions landing somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 pointy hats; some estimates range as high at 100,000. Witch trials as we know them (think Salem, The Crucible, and Monty Python), first came about around 1450 A.D in Switzerland, but gained steam in France, England, and Germany, where heads really got rolling in the late 1500s. The first on-record witch trial and burning took place in Wiesensteig in southwestern Germany in 1563, where 63 were burned for "true and horrifying deeds."

But come now, only a crazy person would blame the bad luck of a community on someone's pact with the devil, right? Right? Wrong. Historians have traced the origin of the idea of witchcraft to intellectuals who had a steadfast belief in "maleifiium" (aka: bad deeds) which came to signify that those who could control events, seemingly communicate with spirits, or make it rain had signed a pact with Satan.

Leave it to the British, though, to spoil everyone else's fun. The Witchcraft Act of 1734 more or less signaled the end of the European hunt as we know it. The Act limited deeds of witchcraft to the likes of street-corner fortune tellers and mediums for falsely representing any ability to conjure spirits. The last so-called witch was executed in England in 1716 and the last on record overall was in Switzerland around 1811.

The most recent prosecution under the Act (repealed in 1951) was the case of Helen Duncan in 1944; Duncan was painted publicly as a defrauder of the public, but a more likely assessment centers on authorities' fear that her clairvoyance might compromise details of the impending D-Day military action. What's that I was saying about scapegoats?