"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»32.

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 Christianity and the Inquisition cannot be considered the cause of the "witch hunt".

Christianity, on the contrary, resisted the people's pagan fears for a long time.

"Popular belief in witches and their ability to bewitch people up to the 12th and 13th centuries was considered a "false superstition". The compilers of the manual for confession – penitentiaries or "penitential books", which spread in Europe since the 7th century, considered such superstitions of their parishioners as a "destructive infection" and indisputable evidence of the loss of the "true faith", and those who were seen in it were entitled to a two-year penance... The Catholic Church has never been known to be prone to corporal punishment or execution for witchcraft. Even for harmful (deadly) sorcery, a maximum of 7 years of repentance on bread and water was imposed. In fact, it was not so much the possible consequences of witchcraft actions, the success of which in the eyes of the Church was doubtful, that were condemned, but the very belief in their effectiveness, which meant the same idolatry."33 "We do not encounter sorcery before the fifteenth century at all."34 Witchcraft and witchcraft are not a very old phenomenon. As a matter of fact, it was as if witches had not been heard of at all until the fifteenth century."35 "Witchcraft was not widespread in the Middle Ages, and by the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th 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."36

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 rule of Metropolitan John II (1080-1088), "those who engage in sorcery and sorcery, whether men or women, should first be turned away from evil deeds by words and instructions; but if they remain unchanged, then in order to avert evil, punish them with greater severity, but not kill them to death and not mutilate their bodies, for this is not permitted by ecclesiastical punishment (discipline) and teaching"37...

Police measures and an appeal to the secular authorities are not provided for by the letter of Metropolitan Photius (it is dated June 22, 1410-1417): "Also teach that they do not listen to fables, do not accept dashing women, neither knots, nor silence, nor potions, nor potions, nor fortune-telling, if the wrath of God comes upon him. And where there are such dashing women, teach them to stop, and to repent; and do not have to listen, do not bless them; and order Christians not to keep their boundaries anywhere, but to flee from them, as from uncleanness. And whoever does not have to listen to you, let them also be excommunicated from the church."38

In the "Questions of Cyricus" (manuscripts of this text are known from the end of the 15th century) the question is: "If the Vedma destroys a man with a potion, what is the opithemia? "And that opithemia is 15 years"39 (penance is not arrest or exile, but church fasting and excommunication from communion).

And a century later (in 1555), in the sentence letter of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, it was prescribed to expel from the villages "sorcerers and wise women"; Moreover, they could be beaten and robbed. "Here a domestic measure against the Magi is recommended: drive them out, and the matter is over."40 "It is quite remarkable that our monuments of penance contain no indications of witchcraft in the Western European sense: there are no indications of a formal connection between man and the devil, of contracts with him."41

According to the historian's observation, "to the great honor of our clergy, it must be said that they got off with sorcerers much cheaper than with the Westerners. 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."42 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.43 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 an attempted murder (even with a cardboard knife).

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 crushed the guilty person to the secular authorities."44 According to the verdict of the court, the last sorcerer in Russia had been burned a century and a half earlier, in 1736 (it was a Simbirsk resident Yakov Yarov, who was burned by the sentence of the Kazan provincial chancellery.

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," "offending 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."46

Is what happened wrong? –Yes. But it is impossible not to pay attention to the distribution of roles in this tragedy. Does the Church Authority Initiate the Persecution?47

Yes, the persecutors demonized their victims. But from the point of view of modern "humanists," these persecutors of witches were profoundly ignorant people. Let it be so, but why then do today's enlightened authors of textbooks and Hollywood pseudo-historical films demonize their victims? Namely, the people of the Middle Ages? Why portray them as fiends of hell, capable of unprovoked and extremely cruel aggression? By the way, the modern world is full of fiends of hell in this sense: people who create and send out computer viruses demonstrate their love for unalloyed evil: they do not take revenge, but simply cause pain to people they knowingly do not know.