The essay by a Dutch doctor De praestigiis daemonum of 1563, has the merit of hypothesizing for the first time a link between witchcraft and mental illnesses with a hallucinatory character. ![]() They fly to the place where the Sabbath will take place and where they will have the honor of kissing the anus of Satan himself, a ritual gesture followed by sexual orgies, dances and human sacrifices of children. To give witches the power to fly is a special ointment that we also find in Bulgakov’s literary masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. The last execution of a witch at the stake took place in Italy in 1828. However, it is not just about rituals in a wood in Benevento: the sect of witches was organized with rules and a real hierarchy: a structure that proposed the ecclesiastical models of Rome with opposite purposes and motivations. One of the headquarters of European witchcraft was in Italy, in Benevento, under a walnut tree where satanic sabbaths took place three times a week. Witches were perceived by the population that was under the influence of propaganda as a real sect. Torture was used as a tool to extract confessions about the practice of black magic from women. In the Malleus Maleficarum there are extremely practical instructions for recognizing and catching witches that inquisitors have been observing for centuries. ![]() The text was a perfect propaganda tool to spread these beliefs even in the population who had always denied the existence of witches. The peak of the extermination of women accused of being witches takes place in 1400 thanks to the text Malleus Maleficarum, written by a German friar commissioned by the Catholic Church. Over the centuries several hundreds of thousands of women are burned at pyres across Europe. In 1275 the first execution on a stake of a witch accused of practicing black magic takes place in Toulouse. Starting from 1200 the father, after more than a century of studies by alleged theologians on demonology, officially opens the witch hunt with an official decree. In Italy, tales of witchcraft are widespread in the Aeolian Islands, the volcanic islands off the coast of Sicily. This type of figure is also present in Mesopotamia, Judaism and the Bible. Classical Greek and Roman literature is very rich in tales of witches described as monstrous beings half human and half animal. Even today, even if no one talks about it, it seems that black magic are a common practice all over the world. The traces of these ceremonies can be found from the times of Ancient Egypt and span millennia. Through the sabbaths, witches could acquire a power that was dangerous to anyone. The witch sabbath was usually a pagan festival held in the woods, in honor of the evil one. In ancient communities, especially in the Middle Ages, the witch represented a danger, a threat to people and to the crops of agricultural land. This is what Islamic fundamentalists continue to do today with their terrorist attacks on “Western sinners”. This is what the church has done for centuries with the witch hunt, accusing people who are fragile or not aligned with their religious ideology, of working in accordance with Satan. This information and beliefs have been exploited to find scapegoats, such as mentally unstable, marginalized, sick elderly, ugly looking people. One of the most widespread main ideas about the witch is that it works in accord with the devil to spread evil in humanity. However, the term witch does not always have a negative meaning: in the pagan world it simply indicated people capable of using filters, herbs, crystals and esoteric knowledge. The witch is a woman dedicated to the magical arts, usually endowed with occult powers and interested in exercising power with black magic. ![]() ![]() A practice that has a very ancient history that is lost over the centuries. One of the main themes of witch movies is the phenomenon of witchcraft. But by studying these themes more deeply, we discover the most absurd and incredible aspects of human history. We are used from an early age to perceive movies about witches and witchcraft as scary tales of terror, created by directors and writers to stimulate our imagination and our desire to confront fear.
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