So Augustine's question is quite appropriate: "Perhaps Christians have established these laws punishing the magical arts? Was Apuleius accused of magic before Christian judges?" (On the City of God 8:19).

So people's hostility to sorcerers is completely independent of Christianity...

Here is the Frankish "Salic Truth" of the VI century. It is difficult to call it a monument of Christian law and Christian culture. This is the very "traditional law" (although already softened by the influence of Roman legal culture and church preaching). And a quite traditional, "universal" attitude to witchcraft is behind its paragraphs: "If someone causes damage to another and the one to whom it is inflicted escapes danger, the perpetrator of the crime, in respect of whom it is proven that he committed it, is sentenced to pay 63 solidi. If anyone casts a curse on another or puts an imposition on any part of the body, he is sentenced to pay 62.5 shillings. If any woman spoils another so that she cannot have children, she is sentenced to pay 62.5 solidi[22]" (Salic Pravda, 19). German law introduced into the European judicial practice the practice of "trial by water" (Leges Visitgothorum 6, 1, 3), already familiar to us from Babylonian sources[23].

As V. Melioransky said, "Pagan concepts of the relationship between religion and the state turned out to be many times more tenacious than paganism itself" [24].

It took fifteen hundred years for pagan fears to permeate church ethics. "The first case of witch persecution occurred in 1498." "We do not encounter witchcraft before the fifteenth century at all"[26]. "Witchcraft and witchcraft are not very old phenomena. As a matter of fact, it was as if witches had not been heard of at all until the fifteenth century."[27] "Witchcraft was not widespread in the Middle Ages, and by the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries it had not become very popular. The church council in Valencia, held in 1248, did not classify sorcerers as heretics and decided that only bishops should deal with them. In case of unwillingness to repent and with stubbornness, they were sentenced to imprisonment for a term determined by the bishop. Vernard Gun said that the Holy Chamber should deal with heretics, and therefore in almost all cases when sorcerers were brought before his tribunal, he simply handed their cases over to the episcopal courts... Almost until the end of the fourteenth century, witchcraft was considered the exclusive business of the Church. The secular authorities did not try to eradicate or tolerate it, and the cases of sorcerers were transferred to secular courts only in rare cases. But by 1390, despite some attempts by the popes to keep the affairs of witches within the limits of ordinary ecclesiastical affairs, we see, as documents show, that secular courts were increasingly recognizing heresy as a crime, and that bishops and inquisitors were ceasing to try witches.

The mass "witch hunt" was by no means a medieval phenomenon, but a Renaissance and even a new European one. The infamous book "The Hammer of the Witches" appeared only in 1485, and the height of the "witch hunt" was in the middle of the XVI-early XVII centuries. The Roman Inquisition was founded only in 1542, and the Congregation for the Index of Forbidden Books began its work in 1571.

And here is a scene from Byzantine life: "In 581, in Antioch, a certain Anatolius the charioteer and his companions were caught secretly performing pagan rites. The Christian police barely rescued the accused "servants of the devil", "insulters of Christ" and "sorcerers" from the hands of the angry mob. Patriarch Gregory himself was barely acquitted of suspicions of complicity; the people fell silent, waiting for the exemplary execution of Anatoly. But as soon as it became known that the accused had been sentenced only to exile, popular passions flared up with renewed vigor. When the exiles began to be put on the schoon, the crowd knocked down the police squads, took possession of the schoon and burned it together with the condemned; Anatoly himself was still on the shore and was taken back to prison. To satisfy the people, he was condemned to death by animal claws in the amphitheater"[29].

Is what happened wrong? — Yes. But it is impossible not to pay attention to the distribution of roles in this tragedy. Does the initiative of persecution come from the church authorities? [30]

The Inquisition, on the other hand, at least gave the floor to the accused himself, and demanded clear evidence from the accuser...

As a result, no other court in history has issued so many acquittals. "In the first half century of its activity (XV century) The inquisitors sentenced up to 40% of all those convicted to death at the stake. Subsequently, this percentage dropped to 3-4."[31] Only two percent of those arrested by the Spanish Inquisition were tortured for no more than 15 minutes. No more than 5,000 people were sentenced to death in Spain in all centuries. In Europe as a whole, "the Holy Tribunal burned more than thirty thousand sorceresses"[33]. Also monstrous, of course. But still, not millions. Against the backdrop of secular repression of the godless 20th century, the figure of 30,000, distributed across all countries and several centuries, no longer seems deafening. The Inquisition was slandered first by Protestant and then by Masonic authors.

The Inquisition functioned as an institution that protected against persecution rather than fueled it.

The ecclesiastical punishments for sorcerers were milder than what the mob could have done to them. This remark is especially true in relation to Russia: for those sins for which in Europe in those centuries they were burned, in Russia only penances were imposed. According to the historian, "to the great honor of our clergy, it must be said that their sorcerers got off much cheaper than those of the West. In that very XVI century, when bonfires were blazing in Europe, on which hundreds of witches burned alive, our pastors forced their sinners only to make repentant prostrations... For our patriarchs, metropolitans and other representatives of the higher clergy, sorcerers and witches were deluded people, superstitious people, who had to be brought to reason and persuaded to repentance, but for the Western European pope, prelate, bishop, they were downright hellish fiends, who were subject to extermination. The mildness of these penances is noteworthy. For example, in the patriarchal charter on the foundation of the Lviv brotherhood of 1586, "penance of 40 days of prostrations of 100 per day" was prescribed for sorcery[35]. If the publisher of this charter believed that witchcraft was effective and could really harm a person and even ruin his life and health, or, even worse, lead to the possession of a demon in an innocent person, then penance should have been much stricter and "at least" equated with penance for murder. Here, however, the punishment is undoubtedly imposed for the real harm inflicted by the sorcerer primarily on himself: after all, he had the intention to harm another person. This intention was punishable by law as attempted murder (even with a cardboard knife)[36].

Who fomented the witch-hunt and who restrained it is evident from the circumstances surrounding the abolition of the Inquisition. In Russia, "for the end of the 19th century, we have at our disposal a whole statistics of lynchings of sorcerers. Having studied 75 mentions of magic in 1861–1917 relating to the Great Russian and Ukrainian provinces, K. Vorobets came to the conclusion that in 48 percent of cases the world reacted with "anger or cruelty." One of the most famous cases is the massacre of the widow soldier Agrafena Ignatieva in the village of Vrachevka, Tikhvin district (1879). Ignatieva was locked in a hut, the windows were boarded up and the roof was set on fire, with more than 300 people present. According to S. Frank, it was difficult to prosecute such persons, since witchcraft was no longer considered a criminal act from a legal point of view, but often it turned out that the plaintiffs themselves were punished while the witch doctor remained at large. As in the case of horse stealing, the peasants, faced with harmful spells and feeling that they were not protected by the state, took matters into their own hands. Following this logic, it must be admitted that lynchings increased as the persecution of witchcraft from above ceased... It is important that, along with lynching, there were also traditions of organized persecution from below, when the peasants handed over the guilty to the secular authorities."[37]

Here are just three of the considerable number of publications in the modern press on this topic: "In Mozhaisk, a criminal shot two women at once - 64-year-old Larisa Starchenkova and her 39-year-old daughter Nadezhda Samokhina For what? When the killer was caught, he calmly explained: "They bewitched me." Here is what Nadezhda Samokhina's husband Evgeny told the correspondent of "Trud": "In the morning, at about nine o'clock, Larisa Tikhonovna began to prepare breakfast. And Nadya and I were still asleep. And then the phone rang. I woke up and heard my neighbor shouting outside the window: "Stop doing this." "What's the matter?" asked Larisa Tikhonovna. "You bewitched your neighbor to death, and now you're getting to us..." Then there were several pops that sounded like gunshots. Later it turned out that their neighbor, 51-year-old professional photographer Alexander Rodionov, shot the woman in the head four times. Rodionov admitted to the investigator that, after the "sorceresses" moved here, people began to die in the area. And all his relatives allegedly fell ill with an unknown ailment. And then he turned to the healer, who said that a neighbor had brought a curse on them. The most surprising thing is that all this nonsense was repeated by the seemingly healthy wife of the criminal. And Eugene kept repeating: "If I hadn't killed these sorceresses, they would have killed me." Alas, similar tragedies of the "witch hunt" occur in other regions of Russia. Until now, none of the residents of the village of Znamenki, Nizhny Novgorod region, can understand why the 87-year-old woman did not please the watchmen of the rural poultry house. Two guys tried to burn her alive twice, thinking that she was a witch. The woman miraculously escaped death, and her house burned to the ground. The savage crime was committed in the village of Drabovka, Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi district (Cherkasy region). A fire broke out in a private house owned by a 37-year-old local resident Mikhail V. Firefighters who arrived at the scene found the charred corpse of a woman on the veranda. Later, her roommate admitted that he burned the woman because she was a "witch." Moreover, he also burned the woman's black cat, which he also suspected of having ties with evil spirits."[38]{39}