Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
Liebler's daughter; Goebel's child, the most beautiful girl in
Wurtzburg; a student who knew many languages; two boys
from the Minster, each twelve years old; Stepper's little
daughter; the woman who kept the bridge gate; an old
woman; the little son of the town council bailiff; the wife of
Knertz, the butcher; the infant daughter of Dr Schultz; a
blind girl; Schwartz, canon at Hach . . .
On and on it goes. Some were given special humane attention:
'The little daughter of Valkenberger was privately executed and
burned.' There were twenty-eight public immolations, each with
four to six victims on average, in that small city in a single year.
This was a microcosm of what was happening all across Europe.
No one knows how many were killed altogether - perhaps
hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. Those responsible for
prosecuting, torturing, judging, burning and justifying were selfless.
Just ask them.
They could not be mistaken. The confessions of witchcraft
could not be based on hallucinations, say, or attempts to satisfy
the inquisitors and stop the torture. In such a case, explained the
witch judge Pierre de Lancre (in his 1612 book, Description of the
Inconstancy of Evil Angels), the Catholic Church would be
committing a great crime by burning witches. Those who raise
such possibilities are thus attacking the Church and ipso facto
committing a mortal sin. Critics of witch-burning were punished
and, in some cases, themselves burnt. The inquisitors and torturers
were doing God's work. They were saving souls. They were
foiling demons.
Witchcraft of course was not the only offence that merited
torture and burning at the stake. Heresy was a still more serious
crime, and both Catholics and Protestants punished it ruthlessly.
In the sixteenth century the scholar William Tyndale had the
temerity to contemplate translating the New Testament into
English. But if people could actually read the Bible in their own
language instead of arcane Latin, they could form their own,
independent religious views. They might conceive of their own
private unintermediated line to God. This was a challenge to the
job security of Roman Catholic priests. When Tyndale tried to
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