Live at the Witch Trials.

"We're still one step ahead of you. I still believe in the r'n'r dream, r'n'r as primal scream. Tied to the Puritan ethic, nonsympathetic to spastics. After all this, still a lonely bastard. Eggheads, boneheads, queue, queue for them. We were early and we were late but, still, live at the witch trials" - Live at the Witch Trials, The Fall.

The always brilliant Deborah Hyde's talk for Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub last Wednesday, Witchcraft and the Law in England, had nothing whatsoever to do with The Fall. Like that band, however, it was fascinating, often hard to follow, and twisted and turned through various themes while, at all times, remaining completely enthralling.

Deborah's got form. I've seen her giving talks about fairies (again at Greenwich) and vampires (for the London Fortean Society) since I've been blogging and there were talks before that too. Including the time, oft referenced by myself, that I willingly drank a goblet of cat's blood one Christmas in Camden.

I'd not been able to get my regulation pie'n'mash at Goddards due to a burst water pipe nearby so a goblet of feline claret would have probably got me drunk. Instead, I stuck to a couple of pints of lager as Deborah began by telling us that a talk about witchcraft and the law on a worldwide basis would be just too big a topic, we'd be there all week, so she'd be primarily talking about witchcraft laws throughout Europe before narrowing it down to cover specific English laws on the subject. It was a talk that was more academic in its nature than her previous ones and as such, unfortunately, there were no quizzes, stunts, or sweeties thrown out to the audience.

Throughout most of history, most people have believed in mysterious and supernatural forces. Science hadn't developed enough to explain everything, it still hasn't, and official religion was often used to understand these supposedly supernatural forces. But, at the same time, there was a kind of 'freelance spirituality' in play which gave us terms like necromancer etc;

We need ways to formalise and conceptualise things that we can't rationalise. Once we'd invented these supernatural explanations would we be able to harness them to help us in our lives? For the first thousand or so years of Christianity the answer to that question was no. We couldn't. Supernatural forces, officially, in law, did not exist.

Yet it was still advised that fortune tellers etc; should be 'erased' from parishes. Not because they had mysterious powers or because they were believed to be witches but because it was widely held by the law, then set by religious authorities, that they were con artists. When individual domains did decide to partake of witch trials it provoked a response from Rome. Pope Gregory VII wrote to Harald II of Denmark in the eleventh century concerned about witch trials taking place under his reign.

As Christianity spread out over Europe and North America it became an ever more hierarchical and monopolistic form of religion and clamped down more tightly on any kind of spiritual extemporisation. Schisms occured. The most famous being the one between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Yet Christians from now opposing denominations fought aside each other. Catholic soldiers, for examples, fought in Orthodox crusades.

The theory being, one presumes, that any Christian (even a 'lesser' Christian) is still preferable to an infidel! The term infidel referred to Muslims and Jews, pagan covered those who practiced polytheism, and heathens was reserved for the uneducated types who lived on the heath and had no religious belief whatsoever - or certainly none recognisable to any religious official.

Cunning men (and women) were believed to be practitioners of folk magic and ritualism while heretics essentially fulfilled the role of modern day internet trolls, opposition just for the sake of it. As with trolls they're, at the core, completely reactionary. In that they can only exist as a reaction to something. They create nothing of worth and seek only to stop others doing so. Take a look at the middle aged men getting worked up by Greta Thunberg now and you'll see things have not changed that much.

Deborah broke things down even further and during a section which touched, variously, on gnostic heresies, Bogomilism, Valentianism, Manichaeism, Valdensians, Albigensians, Lollardy, and Jan Hus I must admit I got a little lost and I was equally confused when she riffed, thankfully briefly, on ideas that Jesus had a twin or that Jesus had actually been two different people.

I was still delighted by the idea of oxygen thieves like Piers Morgan existing only in reaction to others. If he was taken off television and everyone stopped following him on Twitter he'd virtually cease to exist. But I don't want to lead a witch hunt. Not even against a grade A twat like Piers Morgan. These aren't the old times. Although many world leaders at the moment are doing their level best to try to make sure they are.

Heresy soon became a rather fluid thing. Primitive trolls were soon joined as heretics by others who couldn't easily be dismissed by the authorities of the time. Preaching the gospel in vernacular form could lead to being burnt as a heretic (and they say Richard Dawkins is intolerant). Cold blooded old times! Part of this was down to the fact that public debates between the church and these non-troll heretics saw the heretics winning every time. The church couldn't have that. So it started killing them.

These rebellions were, essentially, pre-Lutheran attempts at reformation. The Inquisition was established in France in 1213 to hound out heretics (again, not the proto Piers Morgan trolls but those who wished to reform the Catholic church and had been lumped in with the trolls so as to make them appear like enemies rather than reformers - imagine that happening now!).

Torture was permitted but recantation was not. Legal representation was often denied and even when it wasn't it was hard to find a lawyer to defend a charge of heresy as doing so could, and would, result in the lawyer in question being excommunicated and sent to an eternity in hell. Which people actually believed in back then.

With these laws, the Christian church asserted its authority over other beliefs. The Christian church always has, and always will be, built on blood, murder, lies, and torture. It's without a doubt the most evil institution on Earth. One of its great tricks during this era was to have a law passed in which all the property of a condemned heretic could be confiscated after a verdict.

Predictably enough, this resulted in the church suddenly finding lots of rich heretics. Money (along with murder and torture) speaks very loudly to Christians. The Dominican friar and Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas was a big advocate of the death penalty so it says something about the era that those who found themselves up before the courts generally preferred a church court to a state court.

The church courts were seen as softer. I lost the thread again for a bit as Deborah spoke about Becket falling out with Henry II, servants being flogged and burnt at the stake, demon lovers, an incubus in 14c Ireland, and a law once passed that the crime of heresy could include possession of a bible as it undermined the priests.

There's a lot to take in in this story (religious people have done a lot of murdering and a lot of persecuting) and I wasn't always managing. I was however fully aware that it was Edward II who was said to have been killed by having a red hot poker inserted into his anus and when Deborah accidentally named the wrong monarch as the one suffering this final indignity (and was soon corrected) I was back in the room.

Illuminating stuff, but my notes could barely keep up. Johannes Gutenberg's 15c invention of the printing press, you might think, would have marked an onset of a time when the easier dissemination of information began to divest the priesthood of much of its power due to people being able to access their own literature and not relying on church officials preaching it to, or more often AT, them!

But, like the Internet these days, not everybody used the printing press to spread the truth. It wasn't so much 'fake news' or 'spin' that was the problem in the 15c but 'demon manuals' like 1486's Malleus Maleficarum. Usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, it was written by the discredited Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer and called for the extermination of witches.

It was the book that raised 'sorcery' to the level of heresy so now the trolls and reformers had been joined by a new bunch of heretics:- the sorcerers, or witches. The Catholic church, like the populist leaders it has inspired, thrive on constantly finding new enemies. Proving it to be also, essentially, a reactionary, almost parasitical, movement.

In Britain, the Witchcraft Act of 1542 was put into law by Henry VIII and a country that had previously never really heard of witch hunting caught the bug big time. Think of all these Brexiters (not Brexiteers, they're not heroes) who never cared one iota about the EU before the referendum but are now willing to suffer financially, struggle for food, or even die so that the 'will of the people' is passed.

None of them seemed that bothered about the EU four years ago. In 16c Britain nobody was bothered about witches until the rich and powerful started telling them witches were the enemy. Catholics began to call Protestants heretics and Protestants began to call Catholics heretics. Heretics and witches had then, it seems, come to mean pretty much the same thing and if those on the other side were heretics and witches, then they weren't real people, and they didn't deserve to live. Othering and dehumanisation didn't begin, or end, with the Nazis. They were just, with the possible exception of the Catholic church, the most fanatical and murderous example of those ideologies.

This blame game continued, as blame games tend to, and in 1604 James I of England/IV of Scotland ramped things up even further with another Witchcraft Act. Unregulated medicine being seen as the work of the devil was the least of it. James had, in 1597, written and published a book called Daemonologie which aimed to 'educate' his misinformed subjects about the implications of sorcery and explain the reasons why these witches should be persecuted in Christian societies.

It followed James's personal involvement, some seven years ealier, in the North Berwick witch trials. The trials involved over seventy people and took two years to complete. Confessions were extracted using torture and some were burnt at the stake. It is said that between 3000 and 4000 women accused of being witches were killed in Scotland between 1560 and 1707.

In England, in East Anglia, at roughly the same time Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, was finding business pretty good. The English Civil War provided a boon for him and his entire witch hunting career took place during that conflict. In just three years Hopkins and his accomplices were responsible for the hanging of more witches than had been hanged in the entire previous century.

That's a lot of sending people to their death for anyone, not least a man who is said to have died before his thirtieth birthday. Hopkins, for all intents and purposes, was taking advantage of the war to run with his friends what would be recognised now as a racket. People paid him to find witches so he found them. Sleep deprivation techniques were used to force confessions and women were tied to chairs and thrown into the river. Should they float they were deemed witches and executed.

Salem, 1692, saw another very famous witch hunt take place in Massachusetts. The trial lasted for fifteen months, saw over two hundred people accused, and nineteen found guilty and hanged. Another man was crushed to death for refusing to plead in the deadliest witch hunt in North American history.

Obviously there were no witches in Salem - because there are no witches anywhere - not under the definition given to witches in places like Salem. Just people playing fancy dress or people lying about being witches. It was a case, yet again, of religious extremism and mass hysteria. When those two meet the people who have deemed themselves to be good kill those they have decided are bad. Without even looking at each other and asking "are we the bad guys?".

The law in Great Britain was changed in 1735. It went back to prosecuting con artists for pretending to have powers of sorcery rather than executing those who the law deemed were capable of evil spells. The Fraudulent Mediums Act in 1951 prohibited a person from claiming to be a psychic, medium, or other spiritualist while attempting to deceive and to make money from the deception (other than solely for the purpose of entertainment) and replaced 1753's act.

Helen Duncan, whose unconvincing 'ectoplasm' was famously made of cheesecloth, was the last person to be imprisoned, in 1944, under the Witchcraft Act in Britain but the end of hunting for witches didn't mean the end of witch hunts. You don't need a witch for a witch hunt. You just need to invent an enemy, spread lies about them - ideally using the popular press or social media, and wait for a braying mob, now armed with tweets rather than pitchforks, to come and do their work.

It worked for Hopkins, it worked for James I/IV, and it's working for Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. The history of witchcraft and the law is intriguing, complicated, and, at times, terrifying. The fact that, in essence, it still happens is deeply concerning but, as ever, Deborah Hyde left us on a positive note. "Nonsense is nonsense" she opined, correctly "but the history of nonsense is scholarship". As is an evening in the company of Deborah Hyde and Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub. Yet again, thanks!