| To Remember In Tribute to those who have gone before and will come after NEVER FORGET |
In Our society, it is sometimes easy to forget. We have so many modern
comforts and we illusion ourselves to believe that we are safe and free to
worship but reality is we are NOT there yet. We Must remember our past to
embrace and appreciate our future. This page specifically deals with the
darker side of this path and the losses we've suffered, the people who have
fought to practice freely and their sacrifices. It's easy to talk about the funner
parts of being a pagan, really we tend to dwell on the positive and shirk our
responsibilities to keep the past alive because it is hurtful. We can't live in
denial or forget. When we stop standing up no one will be left to then all is for
naught.
Our History is Not a pretty one. Most recognize Druidry as the oldest
recorded religion. It is one of few that have such a claim. Witchcraft came
much later and yet pre dated Christianity. How do we know? We have the
record of the Christian Bible to back that up. Even in their religion witches
lived and practiced in the time of their christ. We Pagan's have a long proud
history. We've fought and bleed for it. Things have changed and it's not so
brutal but the fight still continues in our courts, in politics, in every country.
Perhaps we've civilized the fight enough to forget how uncivilized it once was.
Christians have done the same. Christians forget that in the times of their
christ we were the ones running them out of town and casting the stones,
they've forgotten that persecution as have we forgotten ours when the tables
turned.
It's time to go back.
The Witch trials in the Early Modern period were a period of witch hunts
between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, when across Early Modern
Europe, and to some extent in the European colonies in North America, there
was a widespread hysteria that malevolent Satanic witches were operating as
an organized threat to Christendom. Those accused of witchcraft were
portrayed as being worshippers of the Devil, who engaged in such acts as
malevolent sorcery, and orgies at meetings known as Witches' Sabbaths.
Many people were subsequently accused of being witches, and were put on
trial for the crime, with varying punishments being applicable in different
regions and at different times.
The witch trials originated in south-eastern France during the fourteenth
century, before spreading through central Europe and then into other parts of
the continent and also amongst European colonies in North America. While
early trials fall still within the Late Medieval period, the peak of the witch hunt
was between 1580 and 1630. The last known trial occurred in 1782, though a
prosecution was commenced in Tennessee as recently as 1833. Amongst the
best known of these trials were the Scottish North Berwick witch trials,
Swedish Torsåker witch trials and the American Salem witch trials. Among the
largest and most notable were the Trier witch trials (1581–1593), the Fulda
witch trials (1603–1606), the Würzburg witch trial (1626–1631) and the
Bamberg witch trials (1626–1631). Over the entire duration of the
phenomenon of some four centuries, an estimated total of 40,000 to 60,000
people were executed.
Various acts of torture were used against accused witches to coerce
confessions and perhaps cause them to name their co-conspirators. The
torture of witches began to grow after 1468 when the Pope declared
witchcraft to be "crimen exeptum" and thereby removed all legal limits on the
application of torture in cases where evidence was difficult to find. With the
publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487 the accusations and torture of
witches again began to increase, leading to the deaths of thousands.
In Italy, an accused witch was deprived of sleep for periods of up to forty
hours. This technique was also used in England, but without a limitation on
time. Sexual humiliation torture was used, such as forced sitting on red-hot
stools with the claim that the accused woman would not perform sexual acts
with the devil.
Besides torture, at trial certain "proofs" were taken as valid to establish that a
person practiced witchcraft. Peter Binsfeld contributed to the establishment of
many of these proofs, described in his book Commentarius de Maleficius
(Comments on Witchcraft).
The diabolical mark. Usually, this was a mole or a birthmark. If no such mark
was visible, the examiner would claim to have found an invisible mark.
Diabolical pact. This was an alleged pact with Satan to perform evil acts in
return for rewards.
Denouncement by another witch. This was common, since the accused could
often avoid execution by naming accomplices.
Relationship with other convicted witch/witches
Blasphemy
Participation in Sabbaths
To cause harm that could only be done by means of sorcery
Possession of elements necessary for the practice of black magic
To have one or more witches in the family
To be afraid during the interrogatories
Not to cry under torment (supposedly by means of the Devil's aid)
To have had sexual relationships with a demon
Legal treatises on witchcraft that were widely referred to in continental
European trials include the popular Malleus Maleficarum (1487) by Heinrich
Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, the Tractatus de sortilegiis (1536) by Paolo
Grillandi and the Praxis rerum criminalium (1554) by Joos de Damhouder.
Executions
The sentence generally was death (as Exodus 22:18 states, "Thou shalt not
suffer a witch to live"). There were other sentences, the most common to be
chained for years to the oars of a ship, or excommunicated then imprisoned.
[citation needed]
Nearly always, a witch's execution involved burning of their body. In England,
witches were usually hanged before having their bodies burned and their
ashes scattered. In Scotland, the witches were usually strangled at the stake
before having their bodies burned—though there are several instances where
they were burned alive. In France, witches were nearly always burned alive.
In America people convicted of witchcraft were hanged (in a handful of
exceptional cases, such as that of Giles Corey at Salem, alleged witches who
refused to plead were pressed to death without trial).
The frequent use of "swimming" to test innocence or guilt means that an
unknown number also drowned prior to conviction.
In A History of Torture, George Ryley Scott says:
The peculiar beliefs and superstitions attached to or associated with
witchcraft caused those who were suspected of practising the craft to be
extremely likely to be subjected to tortures of greater degree than any
ordinary heretic or criminal. More, certain specific torments were invented for
use against them.
It has been suggested that the execution of persons associated with
witchcraft resulted in the loss of much traditional knowledge and folklore,
which was often regarded with suspicion and tainted by association.
Numbers of executions
Ever since the ending of the witch hunt, various scholars have estimated how
many men, women and children were executed for witchcraft across Europe
and North America, with numbers varying wildly depending on the method
used to generate the estimate. In the nineteenth century, historians were still
unsure as to the exact number, for instance the German folklorist Jacob
Grimm claimed that the number was simply "countless" whilst the Scottish
journalist Charles Mackay believed that it was "thousands upon thousands".
Within several decades, the American suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage had
claimed that nine million women had been killed in the European trials, a figure
which would be repeated by a number of later writers such as Gerald
Gardner, although it has since been described as having "no rational basis
whatsoever" by the professional historian Ronald Hutton.
In the latter part of the 20th century, as historians began to study the witch
trials in greater depth, the estimated number of executions began to be
reduced, with the historian Norman Cohn, in Europe's Inner Demons (1975)
criticising claims that they were in the hundreds of thousands, calling these
"fantastic exaggerations". Attempting to come to an accurate figure, the
historian Brian Levack, author of The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe
(1987), took the number of known European witch trials and multiplied it by
the average rate of conviction and execution. This provided him with a figure
of around 60,000 deaths, however, for the third edition of the work (2006) he
later reassessed that number to 45,000. This number was criticised as being
too low by Anne Llewellyn Barstow, author of Witchcraze: A New History of
the European Witch Hunts (1994)—a work which was derided as un-scholarly
and "largely ignored by academics"—who herself arrived at a number of
approximately 100,000 deaths by attempting to adjust Levack's estimate to
account for what she believed were unaccounted lost records, although
historians have pointed out that Levack's estimate had already been adjusted
for these.
Ronald Hutton, in his unpublished essay "Counting the Witch Hunt", counted
local estimates, and in areas where estimates were unavailable attempted to
extrapolate from nearby regions with similar demographics and attitudes
towards witch hunting. He reached an estimate of 40,000 total executions.
Table of recorded and estimated executions according to Hutton's estimates
Country
Recorded
Estimated
American Colonies
36
35–37
Austria
??
1,500–3,000
Belgium
??
250
Bohemia
??
1,000–2,000
Channel Islands
66
66–80
Denmark
??
1,000
England (and Wales)
228
300–1,000
Estonia
65
100
Finland
115
115
France
775
5,000–6,000
Germany
8,188
17,324–26,000
Hungary
449
800
Iceland
22
22
Ireland
4
4–10
Italy
95
800
Latvia
??
100
Luxembourg
358
355–358
Netherlands
203
203–238
Norway
280
350
Poland
???
1,000–5,000
Portugal
7
7
Russia
10
10
Scotland
599
1,100–2,000
Spain
6
40–50
Sweden
??
200–250
Switzerland
1,039
4,000–5,000
Grand Total:
12,545
35,184–63,850
And of course we Roma's fell victim in the Holocaust as well:
The Gypsies of Europe were registered, sterilized, ghettoized, and then
deported to concentration and death camps by the Nazis. Approximately
250,000 to 500,000 Gypsies were murdered during the Holocaust - an event
they call the Porajmos (the "Devouring").
A Short History
Approximately a thousand years ago, several groups of people migrated from
northern India, dispersing throughout Europe over the next several centuries.
Though these people were part of several tribes (the largest of which are the
Sinti and Roma), the settled peoples called them by a collective name,
"Gypsies" -- which stems from the one time belief that they had come from
Egypt.
Nomadic, dark-skinned, non-Christian, speaking a foreign language (Romani),
not tied to the land - the Gypsies were very different from the settled peoples
of Europe. Misunderstandings of Gypsy culture created suspicions and fears,
which in turn led to rampant speculations, stereotypes, and biased stories.
Unfortunately, too many of these stereotypes and stories are still readily
believed today.
Throughout the following centuries, non-Gypsies (Gaje) continually tried to
either assimilate the Gypsies or kill them. Attempts to assimilate the Gypsies
involved stealing their children and placing them with other families; giving
them cattle and feed, expecting them to become farmers; outlawing their
customs, language, and clothing as well as forcing them to attend school and
church.
Decrees, laws, and mandates often allowed the killing of Gypsies. For
instance, in 1725 King Frederick William I of Prussia ordered all Gypsies over
18 years of age to be hanged. A practice of "Gypsy hunting" was quite
common - a game hunt very similar to fox hunting. Even as late as 1835, there
was a Gypsy hunt in Jutland (Denmark) that "brought in a bag of over 260
men, women and children."
Though the Gypsies had undergone centuries of such persecution, it remained
relatively random and sporadic until the twentieth century when the negative
stereotypes became intrinsically molded into a racial identity, and the Gypsies
were systematically slaughtered.
The Gypsies Under the Third Reich
The persecution of Gypsies began in the very beginning of the Third Reich -
Gypsies were arrested and interned in concentration camps as well as
sterilized under the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased
Offspring. Yet, in the beginning, Gypsies were not specifically named as a
group that threatened the Aryan, German people. This was because under
Nazi racial ideology, Gypsies were Aryans.
Thus, the Nazis had a problem: how could they persecute a group enveloped
in negative stereotypes but supposedly part of the Aryan, super race?
After much thinking, Nazi racial researchers found a "scientific" reason to
persecute at least most of the Gypsies. They found their answer in Professor
Hans F. K. Günther's book Rassenkunde Europas ("Anthropology of Europe")
where he wrote:
The Gypsies have indeed retained some elements from their Nordic home, but
they are descended from the lowest classes of the population in that region.
In the course of their migrations, they have absorbed the blood of the
surrounding peoples, and have thus become an Oriental, western-Asiatic
racial mixture, with an addition of Indian, mid-Asiatic, and European strains.
Their nomadic mode of living is a result of this mixture. The Gypsies will
generally affect Europe as aliens.
With this belief, the Nazis needed to determine who was "pure" Gypsy and
who was "mixed." Thus, in 1936, the Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and
Population Biology Research Unit, with Dr. Robert Ritter at its head, to study
the Gypsy problem and to make recommendations for Nazi policy.
As with the Jews, the Nazis needed to determine who was to be considered a
"Gypsy." Dr. Ritter decided that someone could be considered a Gypsy if
they had "one or two Gypsies among his grandparents" or if "two or more of
his grandparents are part-Gypsies." Kenrick and Puxon personally blame Dr.
Ritter for the additional 18,000 German Gypsies that were killed because of
this more inclusive designation, rather than if the same rules had been
followed as were applied to Jews.
To study Gypsies, Dr. Ritter, his assistant Eva Justin, and his research team
visited the Gypsy concentration camps (Zigeunerlagers) and examined
thousands of Gypsies - documenting, registering, interviewing, photographing,
and finally categorizing them.
It was from this research that Dr. Ritter formulated that 90% of Gypsies were
of mixed blood, thus dangerous.
Having established a "scientific" reason to persecute 90% of the Gypsies, the
Nazis needed to decide what to do with the other 10% - the ones that were
nomadic and appeared to have the least number of "Aryan" qualities. At times
Himmler discussed letting the "pure" Gypsies roam relatively freely and also
suggested a special reservation for them. Assumably as part of one of these
possibilities, nine Gypsy representatives were selected in October 1942 and
told to create lists of Sinti and Lalleri to be saved.
There must have been confusion within the Nazi leadership, for it seems that
many wanted all Gypsies killed, with no exceptions, even if they were
categorized as Aryan. On December 3, 1942, Martin Bormann wrote in a
letter to Himmler:
. . . special treatment would mean a fundamental deviation from the
simultaneous measures for fighting the Gypsy menace and would not be
understood at all by the population and lower leaders of the party. Also the
Führer would not agree to giving one section of the Gypsies their old freedom.
Though the Nazis did not discover a "scientific" reason to kill the ten percent of
Gypsies categorized as "pure," there were no distinctions made when
Gypsies were ordered to Auschwitz or deported to the other death camps.
By the end of the war, it is estimated that 250,000 to 500,000 Gypsies were
murdered in the Porajmos - killing approximately three-fourths of the German
Gypsies and half of the Austrian Gypsies.
AND LET'S NOT FORGET THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings before county court trials to
prosecute people accused of witchcraft in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and
Middlesex in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693.
Despite being generally known as the Salem witch trials, the preliminary
hearings in 1692 were conducted in a variety of towns across the province:
Salem Village (now Danvers), Ipswich, Andover and Salem Town.
The best-known trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in
1692 in Salem Town. Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned, with
even more accused but not formally pursued by the authorities. All twenty-six
who went to trial before this court were convicted. The four sessions of the
Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, held in Salem Village, but also in
Ipswich, Boston and Charlestown, produced only three convictions in the thirty-
one witchcraft trials it conducted. The two courts convicted twenty-nine
people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen
women and five men, were executed by hanging. One man, Giles Corey,
refused to enter a plea and was crushed to death under heavy stones in an
attempt to force him to do so. At least five more of the accused died in prison.
The episode is one of the most famous cases of mass hysteria, and has been
used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about
the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, lapses in
due process, and local governmental intrusion on individual liberties.
Pagan's have fallen before us, never forget their journey and never forget
those who helped us get to where we are today in our struggle to practice
freely and without fear.
Gerald Brousseau Gardner (13 June 1884 – 12 February 1964), who
sometimes used the craft name Scire, was an influential English Wiccan, as
well as an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, writer, weaponry expert
and occultist. He was instrumental in bringing the Neopagan religion of Wicca
to public attention in Britain and wrote some of its definitive religious texts. He
himself typically referred to the faith as "witchcraft" or "the witch-cult", its
adherents "the Wica", and he claimed that it was the survival of a pre-
Christian pagan Witch cult that he had been initiated into by a New Forest
coven in 1939.
Gardner spent much of his life abroad in southern and south-eastern Asia,
where he developed an interest in many of the native peoples, and wrote
about some of their magical practices. It was after his retirement and return
to England that he was initiated into Wicca by the New Forest coven.
Subsequently fearing that this religion, which he apparently believed to be a
genuine continuance of ancient beliefs, would die out, he set about
propagating it through initiating others, mainly through the Bricket Wood
coven, and introduced a string of notable High Priestesses into Wicca,
including Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone.
He would go on to develop his own variant of the Craft that has come to be
named after him, Gardnerian Wicca, which combined the teachings that he
had received from the New Forest coven with additional ideas taken from a
number of disparate sources, including Freemasonry, ceremonial magic,
mediaeval grimoires and the writings of the occultist Aleister Crowley, a man
whom Gardner knew personally.
He also published two books on the subject of Wicca, Witchcraft Today
(1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), along with a couple of novels,
and ran the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on the Isle of Man, which was
devoted to the subject. For this, he has left an enduring legacy on the modern
Wiccan and Neopagan movement, and is frequently referred to as "the Father
of Wicca".
Margot Adler (born April 16, 1946) in Little Rock, Arkansas is an author,
journalist, lecturer, Wiccan priestess and radio journalist and correspondent
for National Public Radio (NPR).
I will add more as I have time but I wanted to pay a homage and honor those
who have made my religion a possibility as we live it today.
comforts and we illusion ourselves to believe that we are safe and free to
worship but reality is we are NOT there yet. We Must remember our past to
embrace and appreciate our future. This page specifically deals with the
darker side of this path and the losses we've suffered, the people who have
fought to practice freely and their sacrifices. It's easy to talk about the funner
parts of being a pagan, really we tend to dwell on the positive and shirk our
responsibilities to keep the past alive because it is hurtful. We can't live in
denial or forget. When we stop standing up no one will be left to then all is for
naught.
Our History is Not a pretty one. Most recognize Druidry as the oldest
recorded religion. It is one of few that have such a claim. Witchcraft came
much later and yet pre dated Christianity. How do we know? We have the
record of the Christian Bible to back that up. Even in their religion witches
lived and practiced in the time of their christ. We Pagan's have a long proud
history. We've fought and bleed for it. Things have changed and it's not so
brutal but the fight still continues in our courts, in politics, in every country.
Perhaps we've civilized the fight enough to forget how uncivilized it once was.
Christians have done the same. Christians forget that in the times of their
christ we were the ones running them out of town and casting the stones,
they've forgotten that persecution as have we forgotten ours when the tables
turned.
It's time to go back.
The Witch trials in the Early Modern period were a period of witch hunts
between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, when across Early Modern
Europe, and to some extent in the European colonies in North America, there
was a widespread hysteria that malevolent Satanic witches were operating as
an organized threat to Christendom. Those accused of witchcraft were
portrayed as being worshippers of the Devil, who engaged in such acts as
malevolent sorcery, and orgies at meetings known as Witches' Sabbaths.
Many people were subsequently accused of being witches, and were put on
trial for the crime, with varying punishments being applicable in different
regions and at different times.
The witch trials originated in south-eastern France during the fourteenth
century, before spreading through central Europe and then into other parts of
the continent and also amongst European colonies in North America. While
early trials fall still within the Late Medieval period, the peak of the witch hunt
was between 1580 and 1630. The last known trial occurred in 1782, though a
prosecution was commenced in Tennessee as recently as 1833. Amongst the
best known of these trials were the Scottish North Berwick witch trials,
Swedish Torsåker witch trials and the American Salem witch trials. Among the
largest and most notable were the Trier witch trials (1581–1593), the Fulda
witch trials (1603–1606), the Würzburg witch trial (1626–1631) and the
Bamberg witch trials (1626–1631). Over the entire duration of the
phenomenon of some four centuries, an estimated total of 40,000 to 60,000
people were executed.
Various acts of torture were used against accused witches to coerce
confessions and perhaps cause them to name their co-conspirators. The
torture of witches began to grow after 1468 when the Pope declared
witchcraft to be "crimen exeptum" and thereby removed all legal limits on the
application of torture in cases where evidence was difficult to find. With the
publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487 the accusations and torture of
witches again began to increase, leading to the deaths of thousands.
In Italy, an accused witch was deprived of sleep for periods of up to forty
hours. This technique was also used in England, but without a limitation on
time. Sexual humiliation torture was used, such as forced sitting on red-hot
stools with the claim that the accused woman would not perform sexual acts
with the devil.
Besides torture, at trial certain "proofs" were taken as valid to establish that a
person practiced witchcraft. Peter Binsfeld contributed to the establishment of
many of these proofs, described in his book Commentarius de Maleficius
(Comments on Witchcraft).
The diabolical mark. Usually, this was a mole or a birthmark. If no such mark
was visible, the examiner would claim to have found an invisible mark.
Diabolical pact. This was an alleged pact with Satan to perform evil acts in
return for rewards.
Denouncement by another witch. This was common, since the accused could
often avoid execution by naming accomplices.
Relationship with other convicted witch/witches
Blasphemy
Participation in Sabbaths
To cause harm that could only be done by means of sorcery
Possession of elements necessary for the practice of black magic
To have one or more witches in the family
To be afraid during the interrogatories
Not to cry under torment (supposedly by means of the Devil's aid)
To have had sexual relationships with a demon
Legal treatises on witchcraft that were widely referred to in continental
European trials include the popular Malleus Maleficarum (1487) by Heinrich
Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, the Tractatus de sortilegiis (1536) by Paolo
Grillandi and the Praxis rerum criminalium (1554) by Joos de Damhouder.
Executions
The sentence generally was death (as Exodus 22:18 states, "Thou shalt not
suffer a witch to live"). There were other sentences, the most common to be
chained for years to the oars of a ship, or excommunicated then imprisoned.
[citation needed]
Nearly always, a witch's execution involved burning of their body. In England,
witches were usually hanged before having their bodies burned and their
ashes scattered. In Scotland, the witches were usually strangled at the stake
before having their bodies burned—though there are several instances where
they were burned alive. In France, witches were nearly always burned alive.
In America people convicted of witchcraft were hanged (in a handful of
exceptional cases, such as that of Giles Corey at Salem, alleged witches who
refused to plead were pressed to death without trial).
The frequent use of "swimming" to test innocence or guilt means that an
unknown number also drowned prior to conviction.
In A History of Torture, George Ryley Scott says:
The peculiar beliefs and superstitions attached to or associated with
witchcraft caused those who were suspected of practising the craft to be
extremely likely to be subjected to tortures of greater degree than any
ordinary heretic or criminal. More, certain specific torments were invented for
use against them.
It has been suggested that the execution of persons associated with
witchcraft resulted in the loss of much traditional knowledge and folklore,
which was often regarded with suspicion and tainted by association.
Numbers of executions
Ever since the ending of the witch hunt, various scholars have estimated how
many men, women and children were executed for witchcraft across Europe
and North America, with numbers varying wildly depending on the method
used to generate the estimate. In the nineteenth century, historians were still
unsure as to the exact number, for instance the German folklorist Jacob
Grimm claimed that the number was simply "countless" whilst the Scottish
journalist Charles Mackay believed that it was "thousands upon thousands".
Within several decades, the American suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage had
claimed that nine million women had been killed in the European trials, a figure
which would be repeated by a number of later writers such as Gerald
Gardner, although it has since been described as having "no rational basis
whatsoever" by the professional historian Ronald Hutton.
In the latter part of the 20th century, as historians began to study the witch
trials in greater depth, the estimated number of executions began to be
reduced, with the historian Norman Cohn, in Europe's Inner Demons (1975)
criticising claims that they were in the hundreds of thousands, calling these
"fantastic exaggerations". Attempting to come to an accurate figure, the
historian Brian Levack, author of The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe
(1987), took the number of known European witch trials and multiplied it by
the average rate of conviction and execution. This provided him with a figure
of around 60,000 deaths, however, for the third edition of the work (2006) he
later reassessed that number to 45,000. This number was criticised as being
too low by Anne Llewellyn Barstow, author of Witchcraze: A New History of
the European Witch Hunts (1994)—a work which was derided as un-scholarly
and "largely ignored by academics"—who herself arrived at a number of
approximately 100,000 deaths by attempting to adjust Levack's estimate to
account for what she believed were unaccounted lost records, although
historians have pointed out that Levack's estimate had already been adjusted
for these.
Ronald Hutton, in his unpublished essay "Counting the Witch Hunt", counted
local estimates, and in areas where estimates were unavailable attempted to
extrapolate from nearby regions with similar demographics and attitudes
towards witch hunting. He reached an estimate of 40,000 total executions.
Table of recorded and estimated executions according to Hutton's estimates
Country
Recorded
Estimated
American Colonies
36
35–37
Austria
??
1,500–3,000
Belgium
??
250
Bohemia
??
1,000–2,000
Channel Islands
66
66–80
Denmark
??
1,000
England (and Wales)
228
300–1,000
Estonia
65
100
Finland
115
115
France
775
5,000–6,000
Germany
8,188
17,324–26,000
Hungary
449
800
Iceland
22
22
Ireland
4
4–10
Italy
95
800
Latvia
??
100
Luxembourg
358
355–358
Netherlands
203
203–238
Norway
280
350
Poland
???
1,000–5,000
Portugal
7
7
Russia
10
10
Scotland
599
1,100–2,000
Spain
6
40–50
Sweden
??
200–250
Switzerland
1,039
4,000–5,000
Grand Total:
12,545
35,184–63,850
And of course we Roma's fell victim in the Holocaust as well:
The Gypsies of Europe were registered, sterilized, ghettoized, and then
deported to concentration and death camps by the Nazis. Approximately
250,000 to 500,000 Gypsies were murdered during the Holocaust - an event
they call the Porajmos (the "Devouring").
A Short History
Approximately a thousand years ago, several groups of people migrated from
northern India, dispersing throughout Europe over the next several centuries.
Though these people were part of several tribes (the largest of which are the
Sinti and Roma), the settled peoples called them by a collective name,
"Gypsies" -- which stems from the one time belief that they had come from
Egypt.
Nomadic, dark-skinned, non-Christian, speaking a foreign language (Romani),
not tied to the land - the Gypsies were very different from the settled peoples
of Europe. Misunderstandings of Gypsy culture created suspicions and fears,
which in turn led to rampant speculations, stereotypes, and biased stories.
Unfortunately, too many of these stereotypes and stories are still readily
believed today.
Throughout the following centuries, non-Gypsies (Gaje) continually tried to
either assimilate the Gypsies or kill them. Attempts to assimilate the Gypsies
involved stealing their children and placing them with other families; giving
them cattle and feed, expecting them to become farmers; outlawing their
customs, language, and clothing as well as forcing them to attend school and
church.
Decrees, laws, and mandates often allowed the killing of Gypsies. For
instance, in 1725 King Frederick William I of Prussia ordered all Gypsies over
18 years of age to be hanged. A practice of "Gypsy hunting" was quite
common - a game hunt very similar to fox hunting. Even as late as 1835, there
was a Gypsy hunt in Jutland (Denmark) that "brought in a bag of over 260
men, women and children."
Though the Gypsies had undergone centuries of such persecution, it remained
relatively random and sporadic until the twentieth century when the negative
stereotypes became intrinsically molded into a racial identity, and the Gypsies
were systematically slaughtered.
The Gypsies Under the Third Reich
The persecution of Gypsies began in the very beginning of the Third Reich -
Gypsies were arrested and interned in concentration camps as well as
sterilized under the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased
Offspring. Yet, in the beginning, Gypsies were not specifically named as a
group that threatened the Aryan, German people. This was because under
Nazi racial ideology, Gypsies were Aryans.
Thus, the Nazis had a problem: how could they persecute a group enveloped
in negative stereotypes but supposedly part of the Aryan, super race?
After much thinking, Nazi racial researchers found a "scientific" reason to
persecute at least most of the Gypsies. They found their answer in Professor
Hans F. K. Günther's book Rassenkunde Europas ("Anthropology of Europe")
where he wrote:
The Gypsies have indeed retained some elements from their Nordic home, but
they are descended from the lowest classes of the population in that region.
In the course of their migrations, they have absorbed the blood of the
surrounding peoples, and have thus become an Oriental, western-Asiatic
racial mixture, with an addition of Indian, mid-Asiatic, and European strains.
Their nomadic mode of living is a result of this mixture. The Gypsies will
generally affect Europe as aliens.
With this belief, the Nazis needed to determine who was "pure" Gypsy and
who was "mixed." Thus, in 1936, the Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and
Population Biology Research Unit, with Dr. Robert Ritter at its head, to study
the Gypsy problem and to make recommendations for Nazi policy.
As with the Jews, the Nazis needed to determine who was to be considered a
"Gypsy." Dr. Ritter decided that someone could be considered a Gypsy if
they had "one or two Gypsies among his grandparents" or if "two or more of
his grandparents are part-Gypsies." Kenrick and Puxon personally blame Dr.
Ritter for the additional 18,000 German Gypsies that were killed because of
this more inclusive designation, rather than if the same rules had been
followed as were applied to Jews.
To study Gypsies, Dr. Ritter, his assistant Eva Justin, and his research team
visited the Gypsy concentration camps (Zigeunerlagers) and examined
thousands of Gypsies - documenting, registering, interviewing, photographing,
and finally categorizing them.
It was from this research that Dr. Ritter formulated that 90% of Gypsies were
of mixed blood, thus dangerous.
Having established a "scientific" reason to persecute 90% of the Gypsies, the
Nazis needed to decide what to do with the other 10% - the ones that were
nomadic and appeared to have the least number of "Aryan" qualities. At times
Himmler discussed letting the "pure" Gypsies roam relatively freely and also
suggested a special reservation for them. Assumably as part of one of these
possibilities, nine Gypsy representatives were selected in October 1942 and
told to create lists of Sinti and Lalleri to be saved.
There must have been confusion within the Nazi leadership, for it seems that
many wanted all Gypsies killed, with no exceptions, even if they were
categorized as Aryan. On December 3, 1942, Martin Bormann wrote in a
letter to Himmler:
. . . special treatment would mean a fundamental deviation from the
simultaneous measures for fighting the Gypsy menace and would not be
understood at all by the population and lower leaders of the party. Also the
Führer would not agree to giving one section of the Gypsies their old freedom.
Though the Nazis did not discover a "scientific" reason to kill the ten percent of
Gypsies categorized as "pure," there were no distinctions made when
Gypsies were ordered to Auschwitz or deported to the other death camps.
By the end of the war, it is estimated that 250,000 to 500,000 Gypsies were
murdered in the Porajmos - killing approximately three-fourths of the German
Gypsies and half of the Austrian Gypsies.
AND LET'S NOT FORGET THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings before county court trials to
prosecute people accused of witchcraft in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and
Middlesex in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693.
Despite being generally known as the Salem witch trials, the preliminary
hearings in 1692 were conducted in a variety of towns across the province:
Salem Village (now Danvers), Ipswich, Andover and Salem Town.
The best-known trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in
1692 in Salem Town. Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned, with
even more accused but not formally pursued by the authorities. All twenty-six
who went to trial before this court were convicted. The four sessions of the
Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, held in Salem Village, but also in
Ipswich, Boston and Charlestown, produced only three convictions in the thirty-
one witchcraft trials it conducted. The two courts convicted twenty-nine
people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen
women and five men, were executed by hanging. One man, Giles Corey,
refused to enter a plea and was crushed to death under heavy stones in an
attempt to force him to do so. At least five more of the accused died in prison.
The episode is one of the most famous cases of mass hysteria, and has been
used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about
the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, lapses in
due process, and local governmental intrusion on individual liberties.
Pagan's have fallen before us, never forget their journey and never forget
those who helped us get to where we are today in our struggle to practice
freely and without fear.
Gerald Brousseau Gardner (13 June 1884 – 12 February 1964), who
sometimes used the craft name Scire, was an influential English Wiccan, as
well as an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, writer, weaponry expert
and occultist. He was instrumental in bringing the Neopagan religion of Wicca
to public attention in Britain and wrote some of its definitive religious texts. He
himself typically referred to the faith as "witchcraft" or "the witch-cult", its
adherents "the Wica", and he claimed that it was the survival of a pre-
Christian pagan Witch cult that he had been initiated into by a New Forest
coven in 1939.
Gardner spent much of his life abroad in southern and south-eastern Asia,
where he developed an interest in many of the native peoples, and wrote
about some of their magical practices. It was after his retirement and return
to England that he was initiated into Wicca by the New Forest coven.
Subsequently fearing that this religion, which he apparently believed to be a
genuine continuance of ancient beliefs, would die out, he set about
propagating it through initiating others, mainly through the Bricket Wood
coven, and introduced a string of notable High Priestesses into Wicca,
including Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone.
He would go on to develop his own variant of the Craft that has come to be
named after him, Gardnerian Wicca, which combined the teachings that he
had received from the New Forest coven with additional ideas taken from a
number of disparate sources, including Freemasonry, ceremonial magic,
mediaeval grimoires and the writings of the occultist Aleister Crowley, a man
whom Gardner knew personally.
He also published two books on the subject of Wicca, Witchcraft Today
(1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), along with a couple of novels,
and ran the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on the Isle of Man, which was
devoted to the subject. For this, he has left an enduring legacy on the modern
Wiccan and Neopagan movement, and is frequently referred to as "the Father
of Wicca".
Margot Adler (born April 16, 1946) in Little Rock, Arkansas is an author,
journalist, lecturer, Wiccan priestess and radio journalist and correspondent
for National Public Radio (NPR).
I will add more as I have time but I wanted to pay a homage and honor those
who have made my religion a possibility as we live it today.
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