Tag: moral panics

The invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was initially met with skepticism

In the 1430s, a small group of writers in Central Europe – church inquisitors, theologians, lay magistrates and even one historian – began to describe horrific assemblies where witches gathered and worshiped demons, had orgies, ate murdered babies and performed other abominable acts. Whether any of these authors ever met each other is unclear, but they all described groups of witches supposedly active in a zone around the western Alps.

The reason for this development may have been purely practical. Church inquisitors, active against religious heretics since the 13th century, and some secular courts were looking to expand their jurisdictions. Having a new and particularly horrible crime to prosecute might have struck them as useful.

I just translated a number of these early texts for a forthcoming book and was struck by how worried the authors were about readers not believing them. One fretted that his accounts would be “disparaged” by those who “think themselves learned.” Another feared that “simple folk” would refuse to believe the “fragile sex” would engage in such terrible practices.

Trial records show it was a hard sell. Most people remained concerned with harmful magic – witches causing illness or withering crops. They didn’t much care about secret satanic gatherings.

Keep reading

Sen. Josh Hawley Says He ‘Took on an Asian Trafficking Ring’ and ‘Freed a Dozen Women in Sex Slavery.’ That’s Not True.

When Missouri police raided several Springfield massage parlors in 2017, as Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) tells it, it was a righteous rescue mission led by a promising young attorney general who would later go on to become a rising Republican star in the U.S. Senate.

Hawley’s self-aggrandizing account goes like this: After getting wind of a potential sex trafficking ring at Asian massage parlors all around Greene County and the city of Springfield, Hawley’s office helped state and county police free “female victims” from being trapped in massage parlors and “forced into sex work,” while “the participants in the ring were charged.”

In fact, Hawley said at the time, “some evidence collected by Highway Patrol, leading up to these raids, suggested that there are potentially ties to Asian organized crime.”

While this tale nicely reinforces Hawley’s long-standing preoccupations with public morality and Chinese hegemony, the evidence doesn’t back up his version of events. The real story is one about police and prosecutor overreach at the expense of potentially vulnerable immigrants, followed by grandstanding and falsehoods from a senator intent on rewriting his own history.

Keep reading