Historians agree that any references to “millions” being killed is a wild exaggeration. The following is the conclusion of two highly regarded scholars of European witchcraft:
It is impossible to calculate accurately the total number of convicted witches who were burned at the stake or hanged between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, but few students begin guessing below the range of fifty to one hundred thousand and some would double or triple that figure. (Witchcraft in Europe 1100-1700 A Documentary History, Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters, Univ. of Penn. Press)
The number of deaths resulting from approximately 300 years of witch prosecutions apparently ranged from below 50,000 to around 300,000. These are tragically large figures, but they don’t come close to approaching the figures claimed by many modern Neopagans. Of course, if even 300,000 pagans were killed at the instigation of church authorities, it would be a horrific crime. But the witch craze had nothing to do with a Christian conspiracy to eradicate paganism.
Witch prosecutions were never a cold-blooded, calculating effort by the church to wipe out a competing religion. They were the result of a kind of hysteria that afflicted Western civilization. Accusations of witchcraft began after 1300. The worst period of the witch craze was between 1560 to 1680, a time of catastrophic events and great social turmoil. In fact, it is hard to imagine how any sanity was maintained under the conditions of this historical period.
This was the period of the “Black Death.” The first occurrence of the plague occurred in 1347, sweeping through the continent and killing at least a fifth of the population. During the next three centuries, pandemics of “Black Death” recurred repeatedly, spreading panic, famine, anarchy, and violence. During the last great London plague in 1665, 68,000 died (described in the well-known Diary of Samuel Pepys).
Contemporaneous with the Black Death was a period of severe climate change throughout Europe, often referred to as the “little ice age.” This period of drastic cooling resulted in the disruption of agriculture, frequent crop failures and famine, along with the introduction of human and animal diseases that were unknown prior to this time.
The social and political turmoil brought on by these natural catastrophes coincided with drastic political and cultural change. This was the time of the Renaissance (1400-1600), and mass quantities of printed books were available for the first time by the mid-15th century. This was the time of religious reformation, political centralization, and wars between Protestant and Roman Catholic rulers. (In fact, political centralization in Europe caused the witch trials of continental Europe, where most “witches” were killed, to be carried out by professional witch-hunting prosecutorial teams rather than local authorities. The efficiency of professional witch-hunters largely accounted for the much greater number of executions for witchcraft in continental Europe than in the British Isles.)
In addition to the anxiety and fear created by such unusual events, this was the last period in the West when magic still dominated the minds of educated people.
It is not easy to recapture in a scientific age the attraction that magic held for the learned of late medieval Europe. When we find rulers routinely employing court astrologers as late as the first decades of the seventeenth century—after Kepler and Galileo had published their findings about the heavens—it requires an effort of the imagination to explain the force that the occult exerted on the minds of educated Europeans. The key point is that magic was a way of making sense of the universe. Magic was a serious, learned, and practical undertaking; there was nothing frivolous about its pursuit. To a considerable degree, magic fulfilled the social role that science plays in the modern world. (Servants of Satan, The Age of the Witch Hunts by Joseph Klaits, p. 32,
Consequently, the tremendous uncertainty, stress, and terror of the period produced magical explanations and conspiratorial theories.
Slowly, over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there emerged something new in the European consciousness, the widespread conviction that humans in league with demonic forces were threatening good Christian people. (Klaits, p.32)
This conviction that a demonic conspiracy was at work was, however, clearly not a calculated effort by Christian leaders to eliminate “female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers,” or other “free-thinking women” (The Da Vinci Code, p. 125). It was a madness resulting from magical thinking in an historical period of extreme stress and fear. It was a madness that claimed victims who were generally innocent of all charges brought against them.
