Morbid Fact Du Jour for October 22, 2015

Today’s Heretical Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Most forms of crime have a history so remote that it is impossible to say when they first occurred. But in the case of witchcraft murder, it is possible to be more precise. In the year 1242, two of the Pope’s Inquisitors were staying in a house in Avignonet, in the south of France. They were in the Languedoc area to root out heretics. Unfortunately for them, their host was secretly in sympathy with the heretics. In the middle of the night, a dozen men with axes were admitted to the house. They burst into the bedroom, and slaughtered the two monks and their servants, hacking at the bodies until they were almost unrecognizable. Then, ignoring the mutilated corpses, they divided the booty.

The reason why this is regarded as the first witchcraft murder is because the heretics who committed the outrage belonged to a sect called the Cathars who, among other things, believed the Old Testament God was a demon. The killing of the Inquisitors made the Pope determined to stamp out the heretics at all costs. A bloody crusade followed. Cathars were dragged from their homes and burned. In 1244, two hundred of them were burned on a gigantic bonfire at Montségur, and that was almost the end of them. The survivors, however, scattered over a large area, some taking refuge in remote Swiss valleys.

The Inquisition, which had been formed specially to eradicate them, pursued and burned them wherever they could be cornered. But these survivors were no longer accused of heresy – of holding false Christian doctrines. They were accused of a new and strange crime: conspiring with the devil, or, as it soon came to be known, witchcraft. The killing of the two Inquisitors at Avignonet was the signal for four centuries of horrible torture and thousands of deaths. If the two Inquisitors had not been killed, it is probable that the world would never have heard the word “witch”.

Of course, there were witches before the persecution of the Cathars. There is the Witch of Endor, in the Bible. But although Exodus says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” no one really minded witches. They were useful old crones who gave you lotion for your backache or told your fortune by looking into a bowl of water. They were as much an accepted part of life as a witch-doctor in an African tribe. The murder of the two Inquisitors changed all that. From then on, people began to look on witches as if they were poisonous snakes.

Culled from: Crimes and Punishment, The Illustrated Crime Encyclopedia, Volume 28