An excerpt about witches from my forthcoming book:
History reveals that, during the Inquisition, the marital wealth accumulated by married priests and their wives became wealth inherited by the wives after the husbands died. But, as the widows’ social, financial, and political power grew commensurate with the amount of their inherited wealth, the male-dominated church and church-anointed male judiciary began to view the women’s growing power as a threat to their power. To retain control of their power, two guidelines were created—by men. Truth and justice was never the goal of these two guidelines.
Under the first guideline, after being accused of being witches, the widows of the deceased priests were persecuted, prosecuted, tortured, and executed. Under the second guideline, all women accused of being witches were deemed to be witches, even if a woman was living a good and proper life, because witches were believed to be able to disguise themselves to appear virtuous. All accused women met the same fate as the widows under the first guideline.
The first and second guidelines enabled the church to seize ownership and control of the wealth inherited by all women after their husbands died—not just that of the widows of priests. The second guideline was specifically intended to preserve the judiciary’s façade of integrity by providing the outward appearance that women were being accused of witchcraft on some lawful basis—regardless of whether or not there was any actual evidence to support a claim of witchcraft.
As many as two hundred thousand women (and some children) were persecuted, prosecuted, tortured, and executed for being witches during the height of the Inquisition, solely for exercising their social, financial, and political power. This statistic equates to three women (or children) being persecuted, prosecuted, tortured, and executed every day, seven days a week, for two hundred years. This murderous statistic is even more abhorrent given the fact that the Inquisition lasted approximately four hundred years, not just the two hundred years in the mid-sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries from which these statistics are derived.
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