WITCH HUNT

Witch Hunt is a challenging horror themed hunting game that takes place in the 18th century. Main focus of the game is on exploration, non-linearity, and.
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First Known Use of witch hunt , in the meaning defined at sense 1. Learn More about witch hunt. Resources for witch hunt Time Traveler! Explore the year a word first appeared. From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Dictionary Entries near witch hunt witch-hazel family witch hobble witchhood witch hunt witching witching stick witch light. Time Traveler for witch hunt The first known use of witch hunt was in See more words from the same year. More Definitions for witch hunt. English Language Learners Definition of witch hunt. More from Merriam-Webster on witch hunt See words that rhyme with witch hunt Nglish: Comments on witch hunt What made you want to look up witch hunt?

Get Word of the Day daily email! Need even more definitions? Ask the Editors Ghost Word The story of an imaginary word that managed to sneak past our editors and enter the dictionary. This law banned the trading and possession of harmful drugs and poisons, possession of magical books and other occult paraphernalia.


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Strabo , Gaius Maecenas and Cassius Dio all reiterate the traditional Roman opposition against sorcery and divination, and Tacitus used the term religio-superstitio to class these outlawed observances. Emperor Augustus strengthened legislation aimed at curbing these practices, for instance in 31 BC, by burning over 2, magical books in Rome, except for certain portions of the hallowed Sibylline Books. The Hebrew Bible condemns sorcery. For whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord"; and Exodus In the Judaean Second Temple period , Rabbi Simeon ben Shetach in the 1st century BC is reported to have sentenced to death eighty women who had been charged with witchcraft on a single day in Ashkelon.

Later the women's relatives took revenge by bringing reportedly false witnesses against Simeon's son and causing him to be executed in turn.

HUNTING MONSTERS IS MY BUSINESS

The 6th-century AD Getica of Jordanes records a persecution and expulsion of witches among the Goths in a mythical account of the origin of the Huns. The ancient fabled King Filimer is said to have. Suspecting these women, he expelled them from the midst of his race and compelled them to wander in solitary exile afar from his army. There the unclean spirits, who beheld them as they wandered through the wilderness, bestowed their embraces upon them and begat this savage race, which dwelt at first in the swamps, a stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human, and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech.

The Councils of Elvira , Ancyra , and Trullo imposed certain ecclesiastical penances for devil-worship. This mild approach represented the view of the Church for many centuries. The general desire of the Catholic Church 's clergy to check fanaticism about witchcraft and necromancy is shown in the decrees of the Council of Paderborn , which, in , explicitly outlawed condemning people as witches and condemned to death anyone who burnt a witch.

The Lombard code of states:. Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female servant as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be believed by Christian minds. This conforms to the teachings of the Canon Episcopi of circa AD alleged to date from AD , which, following the thoughts of Augustine of Hippo , stated that witchcraft did not exist and that to teach that it was a reality was, itself, false and heterodox teaching. Other examples include an Irish synod in , [25] and a sermon by Agobard of Lyons Burchard was writing against the superstitious belief in magical potions, for instance, that may produce impotence or abortion.

These were also condemned by several Church Fathers. Such, for example, were nocturnal riding through the air, the changing of a person's disposition from love to hate, the control of thunder, rain, and sunshine, the transformation of a man into an animal, the intercourse of incubi and succubi with human beings and other such superstitions. Not only the attempt to practice such things, but the very belief in their possibility, is treated by Burchard as false and superstitious.

Neither were these the only examples of an effort to prevent unjust suspicion to which such poor creatures might be exposed. This, for instance, is the general purport of the book, Contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis "Against the foolish belief of the common sort concerning hail and thunder" , written by Agobard d. Early secular laws against witchcraft include those promulgated by King Athelstan — And we have ordained respecting witch-crafts, and lybacs [read lyblac "sorcery"] , and morthdaeds ["murder, mortal sin"]: But if he will deny it, and at threefold ordeal shall be guilty; that he be days in prison: In some prosecutions for witchcraft, torture permitted by the Roman civil law apparently took place.

However, Pope Nicholas I , prohibited the use of torture altogether, and a similar decree may be found in the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. The manuals of the Roman Catholic Inquisition remained highly skeptical of witch accusations, although there was sometimes an overlap between accusations of heresy and of witchcraft, particularly when, in the 13th century, the newly formed Inquisition was commissioned to deal with the Cathars of Southern France, whose teachings were charged with containing an admixture of witchcraft and magic.

Although it has been proposed that the witch-hunt developed in Europe from the early 14th century, after the Cathars and the Templar Knights were suppressed, this hypothesis has been rejected independently by two historians Cohn ; Kieckhefer In , Pope Alexander IV declared a canon that alleged witchcraft was not to be investigated by the Church.

witch-hunt

In the case of the Madonna Oriente , the Inquisition of Milan was not sure what to do with two women who in confessed to have participated the society around Signora Oriente or Diana. Through their confessions, both of them conveyed the traditional folk beliefs of white magic.

The women were accused again in , and condemned by the inquisitor. They were eventually executed by the secular arm. In a notorious case in , Hermann II, Count of Celje accused his daughter-in-law Veronika of Desenice of witchcraft — and, though she was acquitted by the court, he had her drowned. The accusations of witchcraft are, in this case, considered to have been a pretext for Hermann to get rid of an "unsuitable match," Veronika being born into the lower nobility and thus "unworthy" of his son.

Witch hunting

A Catholic figure who preached against witchcraft was popular Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena — Bernardino's sermons reveal both a phenomenon of superstitious practices and an over-reaction against them by the common people. This is clear from his much-quoted sermon of , in which he says:. One of them told and confessed, without any pressure, that she had killed thirty children by bleeding them The resurgence of witch-hunts at the end of the medieval period, taking place with at least partial support or at least tolerance on the part of the Church, was accompanied with a number of developments in Christian doctrine, for example the recognition of the existence of witchcraft as a form of Satanic influence and its classification as a heresy.

As Renaissance occultism gained traction among the educated classes, the belief in witchcraft, which in the medieval period had been part of the folk religion of the uneducated rural population at best, was incorporated into an increasingly comprehensive theology of Satan as the ultimate source of all maleficium.

In , Pope Innocent VIII issued Summis desiderantes affectibus , a Papal bull authorizing the "correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising" of devil-worshippers who have "slain infants", among other crimes. He did so at the request of inquisitor Heinrich Kramer , who had been refused permission by the local bishops in Germany to investigate. The book was soon banned by the Church in , and Kramer was censured , but it was nevertheless reprinted in 14 editions by and became unduly influential in the secular courts.

In , the Spanish Inquisition cautioned its members not to believe what the Malleus said, even when it presented apparently firm evidence. The witch trials in Early Modern Europe came in waves and then subsided. There were trials in the 15th and early 16th centuries, but then the witch scare went into decline, before becoming a major issue again and peaking in the 17th century; particularly during the Thirty Years War.

What had previously been a belief that some people possessed supernatural abilities which were sometimes used to protect the people now became a sign of a pact between the people with supernatural abilities and the devil. To justify the killings, Protestant Christianity and its proxy secular institutions deemed witchcraft as being associated to wild Satanic ritual parties in which there was much naked dancing and cannibalistic infanticide.

Witch-hunts were seen across early modern Europe, but the most significant area of witch-hunting in modern Europe is often considered to be central and southern Germany. Witch-hunts first appeared in large numbers in southern France and Switzerland during the 14th and 15th centuries. The peak years of witch-hunts in southwest Germany were from to Learned European ideas about witchcraft, demonological ideas, strongly influenced the hunt of witches in the North.

In Denmark, the burning of witches increased following the reformation of Christian IV of Denmark , in particular, encouraged this practice, and hundreds of people were convicted of witchcraft and burnt. In the district of Finnmark, northern Norway, severe witchcraft trials took place during the period — In the North Berwick witch trials in Scotland, over 70 people were accused of witchcraft on account of bad weather when James VI of Scotland , who shared the Danish king's interest in witch trials, sailed to Denmark in to meet his betrothed Anne of Denmark.

witch-hunt

The Pendle witch trials of are among the most famous witch trials in English history. In England, witch-hunting would reach its apex in to due to the work of Matthew Hopkins. Although operating without an official Parliament commission, Hopkins calling himself Witchfinder General and his accomplices charged hefty fees to towns during the English Civil War. Hopkins' witch hunting spree was brief but significant: The swimming test, which included throwing a witch into water strapped to a chair to see if she floated, was discontinued in due to a legal challenge.

The book, The Discovery of Witches , was soon influential in legal texts. The book was used in the American colonies as early as May , when Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in Connecticut , [53] the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from to Witch-hunts in North America began about the time of Hopkins. In , forty-six years before the notorious Salem witch trials , Springfield, Massachusetts experienced America's first accusations of witchcraft when husband and wife Hugh and Mary Parsons accused each other of witchcraft. In America's first witch trial, Hugh was found innocent, while Mary was acquitted of witchcraft but she was still sentenced to be hanged as punishment for the death of her child.

She died in prison. Once a case was brought to trial, the prosecutors hunted for accomplices. Magic was not considered to be wrong because it failed, but because it worked effectively for the wrong reasons. Witchcraft was a normal part of everyday life. Witches were often called for, along with religious ministers, to help the ill or to deliver a baby.

witch hunt

They held positions of spiritual power in their communities. When something went wrong, no one questioned the ministers or the power of the witchcraft. Instead, they questioned whether the witch intended to inflict harm or not. Current scholarly estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft vary between about 40, and , Modern scholarly estimates place the total number of executions for witchcraft in the year period of European witch-hunts in the five digits, mostly at roughly between 40, and 50, see table below for details , [3] but some estimate there were , to , executed for witchcraft, and others estimated 1,, or more.

On the basis of this evidence, Scarre and Callow asserted that the "typical witch was the wife or widow of an agricultural labourer or small tenant farmer, and she was well known for a quarrelsome and aggressive nature. In England and Scotland between and , a series of Witchcraft Acts enshrined into law the punishment often with death, sometimes with incarceration of individuals practising or claiming to practice witchcraft and magic. Kate Nevin was hunted for three weeks and eventually suffered death by Faggot and Fire at Monzie in Perthshire , Scotland in The final Act of led to prosecution for fraud rather than witchcraft since it was no longer believed that the individuals had actual supernatural powers or traffic with Satan.

The Act continued to be used until the s to prosecute individuals such as spiritualists and gypsies. The act was finally repealed in The last execution of a witch in the Dutch Republic was probably in In France the last person to be executed for witchcraft was Louis Debaraz in Both women have been identified as the last women executed for witchcraft in Europe, but in both cases, the official verdict did not mention witchcraft, as this had ceased to be recognized as a criminal offense. There is no documented evidence of witch hunting in India before The earliest evidence of witch-hunts in India can be found in the Santhal witch trials in The Chhotanagpur region was majorly populated by an adivasi population called the Santhals.

The existence of witches was a belief central to the Santhals.

Witch Hunt | Definition of Witch Hunt by Merriam-Webster

You're witnessing a witch-hunt,Trump tells followers. To me what's interesting about Trump's tweet is the use of the witch-hunt analogy, because it's a classic way in which somebody implicitly claims, 'I am being unfairly targeted,' because we all believe the people who were accused of witchcraft in were unfairly targeted," she said. In his much-used textbook on The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Levack took one approach to providing a synthesis of the persecutions: Surveying early modern Witchcraft: Mostly in the tribal-dominated areas in India, according to Mishra, thousands of women are assaulted and killed during the witch-hunt.

Way of the Witch. Witch-Hunt and Conspiracy examines the oBanyuwangi Incidento of , also known as the oBanyuwangi Caseo or the oNinja Case,o which occurred in Java, Indonesia, during which killings took place.