By Ben Klassen

In an attempt to purge Christianity of pre-Christian and Pagan elements, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation was born. Can you imagine? A religion trying to purge itself from Pagan elements while its birth was centered in Mithraism; a religion trying to purge itself from Pagan elements while it celebrated Pagan festivals … a religion trying to purge itself from Pagan elements while a cave-temple was dedicated to Mithra in Rome on Vatican Hill, the seat of the Catholic Church. The irony. Anyway, the Protestant Reformation was ignited by Martin Luther with fear mongering taking center stage. People were frightened with stories of the devil and the danger of magic, and they were to be convinced to believe in an authoritarian God who demanded discipline, struggle, and the renunciation of physical pleasure. A series of civil wars followed between Protestants and Catholics in France and England as well as the bloody Thirty Years War involving Germany, Sweden, France, Denmark, England, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire represented by the Hapsburgs. Although both sides considered themselves Christian, blood flowed freely, on the 24th of August 1572 in what is known as the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in France. Instead of condemning the bloodshed of thousands of Whites, Pope Gregory XIII wrote to France’s Charles IX, “We rejoice with you that with the help of God you have relieved the world of these wretched heretics”. Did not both Christian factions pray to the same God? Protestant mobs incited by preachers and with the endorsement of public authority, destroyed images of saints, much in the way that fourth century Christians vandalized the sacred sites and images of more ancient traditions. What ye sow ye shall reap?

Protestant leaders were no more tolerant. John Calvin, whose doctrine formed the basis of Presbyterianism, established a powerfully repressive, police-state theocracy in Geneva that is perhaps best remembered for burning the well known physician, Michael Servetus, because of his dissenting views of Christianity. Just like Catholocism, the Protestants fragmented, each new denomination laid claim to the sole divine truth, denouncing all others. Reformers taught that God was in heaven, not on earth and that any supernatural energy in the physical world could therefore only be the work of the devil and his demons. The whole belief in and fear of the devil became paramount during the Reformation. Attributing malevolence and negativity to the devil removes the power that accompanies responsibility, as well as the responsibility from human beings. If one is responsible for something, one can do something about it, but if negativity comes from an external devil, one can do little but cower in fear or attack those who represent the devil. The belief in the devil engenders a sense of powerlessness, making people easier to control, as does the lack of human free will. Belief in the devil’s power became an essential counterpart to the belief in God, and a means of frightening people into obedience. Both the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter Reformation converted the people of Europe to orthodox Christianity.

The Reformation did not convert the people of Europe to orthodox Christianity through preaching and catechisms alone, but it also took 300 years of witch-hunting from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, that ensured the European abandonment of the belief in magic. The elaborate concept of devil worship was created by the Church and then, used the persecution of it to wipe out dissent, subordinate the individual to authoritarian control, and openly denigrate women. Orthodox Christianity’s vilification of women spawned the witch hunts, or as it is stated in I Peter 3v7, “the weaker vessel”. St. Clement of Alexandria wrote : “Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman”. The Church father Tertullian declared the woman “the devil’s gateway”. According to the sixth century Christian philosopher, Boethius, in The Consolation of Philosophy, “Woman is a temple built upon a sewer”. Odo of Cluny declared, “To embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure” while the Lutherans at Wittenberg debated whether women were really human beings at all. I Corinthians 7v1 states, “It is a good thing for a man to have nothing to do with a woman”. As reformational fervor spread, the feminine aspect of Christianity in the worship of Mary became suspect with the Protestants entirely dismissing reverence for Mary while reformed Catholics diminished her importance. Nice people these, hey ladies? I smell some Judaism and Islam in there. Most of what became known as witchcraft was invented by Christians, however, certain elements of witchcraft did represent an older Pagan tradition.

The origin of the word “witch” comes from the old English wicce and wicca, meaning the male and female participants in the ancient Pagan tradition which holds masculine, feminine and earthly aspects of God in great reverence. Orthodox Christians maintained that it was is impossible for humanity to live without domination and fear, something that this tradition affirmed. It took the Church a long time convince society that women were inclined toward evil witchcraft and devil-worship. In the thirteenth century the Church began depicting the witch as a slave of the devil, reversing its policy of denying the existence of witches. No longer was she to be associated with an older Pagan tradition, but seen as an evil satanic agent. No longer was the witch to be thought of as benevolent healer, wise woman, teacher, or one who accessed divine power. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Church began authorizing frightening portrayals of the devil. Sound familiar to the Hollyweird brainwashing? In 1280 the witch was riding a broom followed by “a small clandestine society engaged in anti-human practices, including infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality and orgiastic sex” at Black Mass. Devil worship was a simple parody of Christianity, the very concept of the devil was exclusive to monotheism and had no importance within the Pagan, Wiccan tradition. The devil demanded adherence to a pact, whereas God imposed divine law. The Christian showed reverence to God by kneeling, the witch paid homage to the devil by standing on her head. Black Mass became Communion and Christian prayers could be used to work evil by being recited backwards. Unbelievable? You better believe it, go read “Religion and the Decline of Magic” and “The World of Witches”.

In 1320 Pope John XXII formalized the persecution of witchcraft when he authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcery. And so the Inquisition had successfully transformed the witch from a phenomenon whose existence the Church had previously rigorously denied into a phenomenon that was deemed the antithesis of Christianity. Exodus 22v18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”, were cited to justify the persecution of witches. Strangely enough the Inquisition overlooked “if you eye bothers you, pluck it out”. John Wesley, the eighteenth century founder of Methodism declared to those skeptical of witchcraft, “The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible.” The Inquisition exposed a whole new group of people from whom to collect money by adding witchcraft to the crimes it persecuted, and it took every advantage of this opportunity. As the author Barbara Walker notes in her book, “The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets” : “Victims were charged for the very ropes that bound them and the wood that burned them. Each procedure of torture carried its fee. After the execution of a wealthy witch, officials usually treated themselves to a banquet at the expense of the victim’s estate”. In 1592 Father Cornelius Loos wrote in “The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology” : “Wretched creatures are compelled by the severity of the torture to confess things they have never done, and so by the cruel butchery innocent lives are taken; and, by a new alchemy, gold and silver are coined from human blood. It was certainly no coincidence that trials for witchcraft began exactly as the trials for other types of heresy stopped.

Amorous relations with Satan included warts, freckles, and birthmarks. Even if the witch’s mark was not found on a woman, guilt could still be established by methods such as sticking needles in the accused’s eyes, however, guilt was only confirmed if the inquisitor could find an insensitive spot during the process. Unless the witch died during torture, she was taken to the stake in the public square, where the inquisitors would cut out her tongue or use a wooden gag to prevent her from talking to the crowds. Such was the hypocrisy, that when the men persecuting the accused witches found themselves sexually aroused, they assumed that such desire emanated, not from themselves, but from the woman. The punishment unleashed on the witch included attacking the breasts and genitals with pincers, pliers and red-hot irons. The treatment of witches’ children was particularly brutal and they were liable to be prosecuted and tortured for witchcraft : girls, once they were nine and a half, and boys, once they were ten and a half. To elicit testimony that could be used against their parents younger children were tortured, even the testimony of two-year-old children was considered valid in cases of witchcraft though such testimony was never admissible in other types of trials. Witches were held accountable for nearly every problem, any threat to social uniformity, any questioning of authority, and any act of rebellion could now be attributed to and prosecuted as witchcraft.

Both Catholic and Protestant preachers would instigate a witch hunt with their sermons, the Basque, Salem and Massachusetts witch hunt are good examples. In England where there were no inquisitional courts and where witch-hunting offered little or no financial reward, many women were killed for witchcraft by mobs. These mobs used methods to ascertain guilt of witchcraft such as “swimming a witch,” where a woman would be bound and thrown into water to see if she floated, instead of following any judicial procedure. The Church included in its definition of witchcraft anyone with knowledge of herbs for “those who used herbs for cures did so only through a pact with the Devil, either explicit or implicit”, therefore, the mere possession of herbal oils or ointments became grounds for accusation of witchcraft. After Alison Peirsoun of Byrehill successfully cured the ailing archbishop of St. Andrews, he not only refused to pay her but had her arrested for witchcraft and burned to death. Not only were the clergy guilty of murder, but some proudly reported the number of witches they condemned, such as the bishop of Wurtzburg who claimed 1900 lives in five years, or the Lutheran prelate Benedict Carpzov who claimed to have sentenced 20,000 devil worshipers. “The chronicler of Treves reported that in the year 1586, the entire female population of two villages was wiped out by the inquisitors, except for only two women left alive”. “Germany is almost entirely occupied with building fires for the witches” and “Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villages on their account”, wrote another man around 1600. “Travelers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes to which witches are bound”.

The persecution of witches was the official policy of both the Catholic and Protestant Churches and not small in scope nor implemented by a few aberrant individuals. Anyone could be disposed of who questioned authority or the Christian view of the world, under the pretext of first heresy and then witchcraft. Witch-hunting secured the conversion of Europe to orthodox Christianity, enslavement through terror and fear. And this my friend is how Christianity became the religion of most of the White Race, not through accepting the teachings of Christ as modern-day self-righteous Christians would like the sheeple to believe. As in Communism, the White Race was force fed and those that stood up against the oppressor were slaughtered. As I already stated earlier, 90% of White Christians don`t know how Christianity became the “official religion” of the White Race. If Christianity had to face a Nuremberg-style trial the evidence would be so damning that this “religion” would be wiped off the face of the earth. Reformational Christians convinced common people to believe that a singular male God reigned from above, that he was separate from the earth, that magic was evil, that there was a powerful devil, and that women were most likely to be his agents, and this they enforced brutally through the terror of the witch hunts. The field of medicine transferred to exclusively male hands and the Western herbal tradition was largely destroyed and ridiculed as “old wives tales”. As then, today the medical field is largely run by governments` money-grabbers and charlatans with their mind-bending psydrugs. The Western herbal tradition had to be destroyed to bring it under authoritarian control.