The Catholic historian Trevor-Roper called the massacres of witches a holocaust - and so it was. The Reformation made it worse. Calvin preached that "the Bible says there are witches and they must be slain" tr130. After the Reformation the Catholics concentrated witchhunts on Protestant areas, the Protestants on Catholic areas. In Denmark saying Catholic prayers was declared an act of witchcraft. The persecution in Germany greatly accelerated after the publication of Malleus Maleficarum. By 1630, according to the Jesuit Friedrich von Spee who bravely met many of the accused: "in Germany especially the smoke from the stake is everywhere." (F von Spee Cautio Criminalis - Legal Objections to the Witchtrials 1631.) Trevor-Roper wrote that after 1630 "lawyers, judges, clergy themselves, join old women at the stake. Terror haunted the countryside and towns in France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Scotland. Calm periods in any locality could suddenly be broken by a spate of killings as the persecution died down or flared up with all the frightening irregularities of a bush fire.

It is now nearly impossible to total just how many were arrested, terrorised, tortured and killed, nor to total the seared memories of relatives and friends nor to number those who were terrified and traumatised, or those who had to live with the fear imbrued over generations of executions that they too would be accused and killed. In some villages practically every woman was killed. Enormous numbers must have been traumatised. As for the numbers killed, recent estimates from conservative academic sources give tentative figures ranging from near to 100,000 up to 160,000 to 240,000 - the 160,00 figure is from Cornell University's witchcraft studies centre. Vivienne Crowley estimated 130,000 to 200,000. Reliance on these figures alone to assess the damage done would be to ignore the trauma suffered by the many more that were accused, exiled, jailed and tortured. These experiences must be deeply seared on the collective memory of this continent - and especially on that of Europe's women.

I have not verified these figures but the following are from figures given in some of the many papers on the witch-trials. Numerous individuals were killed from the 1100s in England and other countries. In 1430 over 200 were burnt in the Valais and some 167 in l'Isere- as well as Joan d'Arc in 1431. In 1437 150 were killed in Briancon. (CE) Ten years later Margery Jordemaine was burnt in London at Smithfield - one of the few burnt in England where the noose was the preferred way. She burnt because she was accused of using witchcraft against the King. In 1524 over one thousand were reported in an old account as burnt in Como alone. In Germany in 1589, 133 were burnt on one day in Quedlinburg and in that same year 48 were also burnt in Wurttenburg. Between 1590 and 1600 ten were burnt every day in Brunswick. In 1598 24 were burnt in Aberdeen. In 1603 205 were burnt at the Abbey of Fulda in Germany. In 1645 20 died in Norfolk. In 1647 witch killings started in what is now the United States. In 1658 18 were burnt on Castle Hill in Edinburgh . In 1659 the Bishop of Galloway allowed a women from Irongrey to be put into a tarred barrel which was set on fire and then thrown into a Scottish river. One of the last of the mass burnings of witches occurred in Bradenburg in 1786 (Hans Kung). Isolated killings in Europe continued after this at the hands of mobs. Thus died Alice Russell in Great Paxton in 1808.

Women comprised about 75 - 80% of those who died in this holocaust of people accused of using non-Christian magic. Reportedly some villages lost most of their female inhabitants. Thousands of killings may not have been reported. Some were killed for "heresy" rather than for witchcraft. Very inadequate or no records were kept of the numbers subjected to horrific torture yet not killed, of those imprisoned - and of the great numbers of their traumatised families and friends. We have only to think of the trauma that would be suffered in any village today if just one of its inhabitants were tortured, burnt or hung, to gain an idea what it must have been like for hundreds of years. No one has assembled all accounts. Few historians have seriously considered the impact on European culture or on the psyche of women of a half millennium long persecution of those seen as working magically or religiously outside the pale of the established Church.

Some recent historians have tried to minimalise the impact of these centuries - by not giving any real weight to the traumas inflicted, portraying those women affected as passive victims, ignoring non-judicial accounts, blindly accepting church or state distinctions over who was killed as a witch or as a heretic and only counting the former, and by merely arguing about the number killed - and even by indignantly asking why the fuss when so many more men were killed in wars. (Ref RH) Nor have the churches ever apologised adequately for their role in inciting and managing these massacres. The writings of the "Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, whose work helped create the "intellectual" justification for these massacres is still being used in the training of Catholic priests.

Behind all these persecutions were the effort of the Churches to monopolise spiritual authority as well as male sexual anxieties and insecurities. It was aggravated when and where the Churches felt most insecure during the period of the Reformation. Although more died by sentences passed by state or community courts than by ecclesiastical courts, it was the church's acquisition of an official "established" status that lay behind the civil terror and it was the preaching of the Churches that incited the civil slaughter and lynching. (With the exception of the Basque region of Spain - where one Inquisitor stood out against the persecution of witches). Politics shaped the witchtrials - thus under Elizabeth 1st, the more Catholic regions of Essex and Lancashire became prime targets. But in general men had created a myth to explain away their neurosis or lack of sexual power and, rather than sort out their own hang-ups, had blamed, tortured and killed women in the name of religion and of all that is holy.