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}

"In the Congo, in June 2002, there was a 'month dedicated to getting rid of witches'. Alas, this is not a joke, these are the words of the tribal leader Owu Sudar. This highly respected man with undisguised pride declared that he had personally instructed his subjects to engage in the massacre of their fellow tribesmen. Sorcerers and witches, according to local beliefs, are old people living on the outskirts of the village, as a rule, women with red watery eyes. They were dragged out into the street, beaten to death with sticks, chopped with machetes, and stoned. They demanded to confess and name the names of "apprentices" and "accomplices". According to rough estimates, more than a thousand people died in this way, hundreds fled, fleeing from reprisals. The small town of Aru, 30 kilometers from Sudan on the border with Uganda, became the center of the witch hunt, after which a wave of aggression swept the entire northeastern part of the country. "Peasants say that some people cast a spell on others, causing them to get sick," said the commander-in-chief of the Congolese army, Henry Tumukunde. He said this to the fact that the inhabitants of the country mainly accuse "sorcerers" and "witches" of generating diseases characteristic of this region. In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, 200 villagers were burned alive on suspicion of witchcraft, which allegedly killed two people, five of their fellow villagers - four women and a man. They were simply taken, dragged to the central square of the village, without being allowed to open their mouths, tied to a tree, doused with kerosene and set on fire. In the state of Bihar (also India), the locals, suspecting witchcraft, executed two women aged 90 and 60."[40]

"03.07.2003 In India, two women accused of witchcraft were burned alive. Two women accused of witchcraft were burned alive by fellow villagers in the state of Jharkhand in eastern India, AFP reported, citing state police. A police spokesman told the agency that the crime took place in one of the villages located 300 km north of the city of Ranchi (the state capital). In this village, he noted, the Godda tribe group is predominantly influential. A crowd of villagers grabbed 35-year-old Bahamai Kiska and 50-year-old Nanka Hambrom. Both women were then taken to a nearby field, where they were doused with gasoline and burned alive. Local residents accused them of witchcraft, because of which one of them allegedly fell ill. Human rights associations have issued statements about the brutal attacks suffered by women in remote villages in India, where witchcraft practices are widespread in tribal communities. Superstition, black magic, and belief in evil spirits form part of the tradition of tribes living in parts of eastern and southeastern India. In most cases, the victims' families and villagers do not report these attacks to the police, and tribal leaders are indifferent to them. NEWSru.com»[41].

There was no Christian Inquisition in these countries and villages. And there is faith in sorcerers, fear of them and witch hunts. According to the laws of logic, this leads to the conclusion that the Inquisition cannot be considered the cause of the "witch hunt".

No, I am not a supporter of the introduction of the Inquisition. But I do not consider it necessary to support anti-Christian myths either.

And it is these myths that are spread by Theosophists. Quoting from Helena Roerich, "The Inquisition was established not only to persecute miserable witches and sorcerers, mostly mediums, but to destroy all dissidents. And among such enemies, first of all, there were all the most enlightened minds, all the servants of the common good and true followers of Christ's behests" – the current Roerich leader L. Shaposhnikova explains: "The essence of the Inquisition is the persecution of the unusual," says one of the books of the Living Ethics. Thus, the Church needed the Inquisition in order to fight, first of all, against dissent of the most diverse kinds, in order to oppose everything new that had formed in human thought. In those terrible times, the inquisitors burned tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of "witches". They burned "in their own name", their monopoly on the truth, their "eternally alive", their fear of those who brought new knowledge to the people, expanding their consciousness, who sought to break through the thick veil of their ignorance. Is it really possible to think, as the deacon is trying to convince us, that the Inquisition burned real witches, and not the unfortunate women and "heretics" slandered by itself, in order to deal with more serious enemies such as Joan of Arc, Giordano Bruno, Jan Hus and the like under their smokescreen? Do you feel the smell of the stinking smoke of uncleanliness and substitutions from the above-quoted lines of Kuraev?" [42].

In fact, it is "unscrupulous" to blame an entire era in the history of mankind without trying to understand the motives of those people's actions. But it is enough to ask at least the following questions to begin with: 1) Did the witches themselves believe that they were witches? 2) Did the masses of the people see witches in these women? 3) Was this belief introduced to the people by church preaching, or has it existed since pre-Christian times? [43] 4) Was there a boundary separating folk witchcraft from the magic that the learned alchemists and "theurgists" of the Renaissance and Reformation were fond of? (5) What is the percentage of those who have been accused of doctrinal transgressions and those who have been accused of direct magic among the people brought before the Inquisition? 6) Were the views of those people who were persecuted by the Inquisition for their views more "advanced" than the views of the inquisitors themselves, or were they even more archaic and represented pre-Christian layers of the worldview? [44] 7) If the latter turns out to be true, then, from the point of view of cultural and scientific progress, what objective role did the Inquisition play in the history of Europe? Will it not be similar to the role of the cruel reformer Peter (and, by the way, the founder of the Russian Inquisition[45]) in the history of Russia?

Without an evidential answer to these questions based on source studies, it is impossible to present the victims of the Inquisition as unconditionally progressive people.