"The attitude of the official Church to the popular faith by virtue of the view in the early Middle Ages remains not entirely clear, since it is not clear from the Gospel whether Christ himself believed in it, and theologians do not comment on this aspect of popular ideas in any way. But among the people, the belief in the "evil eye" persisted throughout the Middle Ages, which is clear from the list of questions that the parish priest should ask parishioners at confession. The "penitential books" do not tell us anything about the illnesses and misfortunes resulting from the "evil eye", but they condemn the belief of "some women" in the possibility of "bewitching and harassing the neighbors' ducklings, goslings, chickens and other living creatures" with a glance or slander."53

It took fifteen hundred years for pagan fears to permeate church ethics. 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."54 In the eyes of secular authorities, witchcraft was an act that had traditionally been considered a crime since pre-Christian times. It was seen not as a religious sin, not as a deal with the devil, but as an attempt on the life and property of a citizen. Accordingly, in the eyes of the secular authorities, "the sorcerer was subject to punishment not for apostasy from the true faith, but for the damage caused... I repeat once again: until the ninth century, secular legislation stubbornly emphasized not the fact of witchcraft itself, but the degree of harm inflicted by the sorcerer."55

And only in the 14th century did Catholic theologians agree with the possibility of the "evil eye" – and Thomas Aquinas refers to the works of Aristotle and Avicenna, from which he deduces that the soul of an old woman is more often full of evil, which makes her very gaze poisonous and dangerous, especially for children (Summa Theologica 1:92,4).

"The first case of persecution of a witch occurred in 1498."56 "By 1390, in spite of 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."57

The mass "witch hunt" was by no means a medieval phenomenon, but a Renaissance and even a modern European one. The infamous book "The Hammer of the Witches" appeared only in 1485, the height of the "witch hunt" was in the middle of the XVI-early XVII centuries. This is not "Dark Ages" in any way.

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?" 58.

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 had it been in existence since pre-Christian times?59

4) Was there a border separating folk witchcraft from the magic that the educated alchemists and "theurgists" of the Renaissance and the 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 who were persecuted by the Inquisition for their views more "advanced" than those of the inquisitors themselves, or were they even more archaic and represented pre-Christian layers of the world?