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.

Witch persecutors, wherever they lived, considered themselves to be victims. They tried to protect themselves from openly announced threats. From the threat of "spoilage".

Yes, when and if people do not believe in witches, witchcraft and corruption, witch hunting seems to be an incredible savagery, purely shameful for Christians. But if this is serious? If such a black effect is really possible on a person for whom neither distance nor walls are an obstacle? And if there really are people who are ready to make the most terrible sacrifices for the sake of receiving "black grace"?

Before you accuse those impressionable Christians (or me) of intolerance and misanthropy, try to predict your own reaction. Imagine if you believed Blavatsky's report that "In ancient times the Thessalian witches mixed the blood of a newborn baby with the blood of a black lamb and thereby summoned the shadows of the dead"48? And what if your neighbor declared her determination to resume the ancient witchcraft rites49, and said that the spirits with whom she was trained considered a sorceress50?

It is reading modern occult literature that makes you treat the Inquisition and the "witch hunt" in a different way. Witches themselves boast of their art, and often do not even disguise their anti-Christian fervor. And if ordinary people believe them, then how should they react?

Rumor spread secrets that crept out of witchcraft's kitchens. The witches themselves assured that nothing would take them, that they did not burn in fire and did not drown in water, and that for a certain fee they could bring damage to anyone... The witches convinced the people, and then the hierarchs, of their reality and of their power, and there was a response, a reaction of public self-defense...

Not only is the Russian revolt "senseless and merciless," but any revolt. People were sincerely afraid of evil spirits and believed in the reality of harm from communicating with them. The "lynch trial" in such cases flared up by itself. The inquisitors, on the other hand, snatched the accused from the hands of the crowd and offered at least some formal procedure of investigation, in which it was possible to justify himself. And they justified themselves (as, for example, the mother of the astronomer Kepler was acquitted of the accusation of witchcraft).

It is interesting to read on the same page of a modern newspaper – "In the Middle Ages, when the fires of the Inquisition were blazing in Europe..."51 and – a report that "The younger generation of one of the Kenyan villages decided to follow the example of medieval Europe and organized a witch roundup"52. What does the "example of Europe" have to do with it? In addition to the fact that the belief in corruption is universal, and supporters of black magic were persecuted everywhere, it is worth knowing that there was no "witch hunt" in medieval Europe.