I am a witch, now please kill me! Many innocent women happily welcomed death by confessing to witchcraft in order to end their excruciating torture during the witch hunt craze between 1450 and 1750. Since many records were lost, destroyed or never kept, the best estimation of the total deaths is several million (4). The main cause of the witch hunts was the Church inflicting fear upon the common and educated man by lying to them about what witches do and who they are. The Church also directly and indirectly increased the pain that accused women would go through during their torture. The Church made it clear, to all those who would listen, that all women were evil and capable of witchcraft. “The Bible’s Apocrypha states, ‘Of woman came the beginning of sin / And thanks to her, we all must die.’(Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus 25:13-26.)” (2). Vicious comments like this caused even women themselves to fear what other women may do. This fear only lead to the distrust of woman. A book written by two German men, titled Malleus Maleficarum, “The Hammer of Witches”, only furthered peoples fear of women’s evil. It states that women are more likely to become witches: “‘Because the female sex is more concerned with things of the flesh then men; because being formed from a man’s rib, they are only ‘imperfect animals’ and ‘crooked’ where as man belongs to a privileged sex from whose midst Christ emerged.’(Malleus Maleficarum, 1486)”(2). The men that wrote Malleus Maleficarum refer to the bible for reasons to why they consider women evil, so if the Church had never incorporated such things into the bible such things may have never been thought. Many ancient myths portrayed goddess’s as evil. Consequently those images of evil were kept and later attached to witches who kept goddess worship alive centuries later (4). Even devotion to the Virgin Mary...
